The Bird Didn't Run

This morning, on my way into work, I forced myself to look at the carcass of a seagull wedged in between the curb and the street; contorted, mouth agape. Dead birds aren’t unusual where I work. There’s a shopping center next door, and a lot of them end up around the building. But this one mattered to me.

I take a lot of smoke breaks at work; the monotony of utility research gets to me. On one of them, out with coworkers, we saw a seagull sitting peacefully on the sidewalk. I worried it was injured, since it wasn’t running or flying away from us. A coworker thought it might be pregnant, which seemed plausible too. We went back inside, and the bird watched us go.

Several hours later, we came back to the same corner. I didn’t see the bird, and felt relieved, thinking it had flown off. Then a coworker pointed it out: the bird was dead, run over by the truck now parked in the street beside it. To reach it on the sidewalk, the truck had left the road, climbed the curb, and dropped back down. The driver murdered it.

That bird knew something was off, and still it wasn’t afraid of us. It didn’t run when we passed it, and it didn’t run from the truck either. Its life was brutally cut short, and that can happen to any of us. A friend of my ex’s was run over in his 20s, nearly a decade ago, bright and gone before he got to do what he could have.

The bird made my own clock impossible to ignore. I’ve spent years building things, dozens of projects, each aimed at a different kind of life. Now finishing them is urgent: they have to land before I die. And not just me; we’re all on the clock.

Mission-companion is my attempt to reclaim some of that time. It folds the scattered pieces of my day into one place, so I can drop a journal entry or hand off an idea in plain language instead of opening a separate app for each. I used it nearly all day today, and it gave the hours back: time I spent hanging out with my coworkers, taking a long lunch, calling my dad twice, while still getting my work done.

I dedicated it to the seagull and gave it a seagull mascot. It’s the most personal thing I’ve built, probably the one tool I’ll never share, since it’s only useful to me. It made me reassess what I’m doing all of this for, and the tribute felt right.

The image that stayed with me was the bird on the sidewalk, watching us, calm. I asked mission-companion to make me a picture of a peaceful seagull. The file didn’t save, but I caught a screenshot.

The carcass was still there when I left the office tonight. It will probably still be there next week, and I’ll force myself to look again. It strengthens my resolve to keep building tools that reclaim time and improve life for others.