the birdman of Bodrum.

For the last two or three years I have been a machine. A robot at home, serving, repeating, going through the motions. Some days it feels like a prison with no escape.

So I have become the Birdman. Not the one the films made famous, the one underneath: a man in a cell who refused to go numb, who kept his birds, tended them, made them his work, and stayed alive inside the walls.

My birds are my ideas. My writing. The vault I am building, the organising, the learning of new things. I tend them every day. I am not waiting for approval, especially the approval inside the echo chamber, where friends and connections like and support by reflex. Contentment without an audience is still contentment.

The isolation is near total. Now and then a visitor reaches the cell, a friend from Imbros, and the door opens for an hour. Isolation depresses. It also builds. Out of it I have made a system of living, a way of creating. Some days I am hopeless. I am still here.

And some days I walk to the seaside and watch the waves. I think of the other butterfly, Papillon, on his island, counting the swells until he found the seventh wave, the one large enough to carry him past the rocks and out to open sea. I sit and watch my signals the way he watched the water. Reading it for the one that frees you.

What is on the far side of that wave? Not a great adventure. Not applause, not a new role, not a new success. If they come they are welcome, but they are not the point. The far side is my freedom. My breath, alone. The feeling that I live and do not only survive. A small island that is mine.

I do not write this for you. I do not care what you take from it. I write it because the writing is one of the birds.

People are not always at full performance. The mood passes. The reboot takes over.
I have died before, and I have respawned.
This is life.
I am still here.