Dear N.,
Every time I happen to see a blackbird, I look for another one. They usually go around in pairs or even small groups of three or four, although seeing a loner isn’t outside the realm of possibility. And so I scan the place I’m in to see whether there’s more than one, as you’re supposed to see at least two for them to bring good luck. The more you see -- even at other times during the day (cumulating the count with those you saw the day prior or those you might see the following day isn’t allowed) -- the better the luck. But if you see only one, then it’s bad luck, and you have until the end of the day for this occurrence to be officially declared as such. The other thing is that you cannot simply do this intentionally. You cannot, one morning, decide to go out and look for two or more blackbirds, even if you head to places where they’re often seen, like city gardens or small stretches of public grass. Doing this on purpose invalidates the good luck that the sight is supposed to bring. It must happen by chance.
Someone instilled this in me many years ago. She might have been a teacher, and most likely she was; of what, I don’t remember. But I remember when she told me, and how. She was one-on-one tutoring me on some subject I evidently struggled with in high school, at her place, and I don’t know why but the conversation drifted toward the blackbirds, during a short break perhaps. I remember her exact words: you see one, and you die; you see two, and something good will happen to you; you see more, and more good will come your way. She said this looking into my eyes, hypnotically.
You see one, and you die. These words have stayed with me, in my head, since that afternoon some forty years ago, resonating in her voice. Since then, every time I’ve seen a blackbird, I’ve looked for another one. And the times I’ve only seen one, I’ve told myself I had until the end of the day to find another, which is just a creative way of saying that I had until the end of the day to die, that I still had a few hours before vanishing into nothingness. Surprisingly, all those times, midnight came and nothing happened. But I’ve always thought that I shouldn’t lower my guard, that I shouldn’t take this lightly, as I’m sure the rule works -- it’s just that there must be some kind of tweak that escapes me. A subtle, tiny detail, like that all the feathers of the bird must be fully black, pitch black, for example; that if it has even one feather that isn’t fully black -- a light black or a dark gray, perhaps -- it doesn’t work. And that, evidently, based on this subtle detail, all those lonely blackbirds I’ve seen since that afternoon didn’t have all their feathers fully black. Of course, the same must be true the other way around, and the reason I haven’t had a major stroke of fortune yet is because the blackness of the feathers of all the multiple blackbirds I’ve seen at once wasn’t of the purest degree.
Sometimes I think of this little world that I have created for myself as a place where the sky is domed like a bell and holds everything beneath a jar made of blue gelatin, like Mircea Cărtărescu writes in Solenoid when he describes his childhood neighborhood in Floreasca. And, exactly like in Solenoid, I have to boldly push through the two or three meters of blue gelatin to go outside, where above there is no sky, just a gray void, and where the people always marvel at the azure drops left in my hair and on my clothes. A world where one blackbird, of the blackest black kind, can determine my destiny.
Now, why am I writing this to you, you may wonder. Perhaps because I’ve kept it to myself all these years, and I feel that if I don’t tell someone, it’ll follow me into the grave, leaving no trace for posterity. Or perhaps because I feel I’m inexorably nearing the day when that one blackbird I see will prove fatal once I hit midnight, like a macabre version of Cinderella, and I need to leave a legacy -- a warning, rather -- that the blackbird thing is, indeed, a thing. No, none of these reasons, although they are all valid in their own right.
I’m writing because I received a book in the mail today. A little worn paperback of no more than a hundred pages that they sent me by mistake instead of the one I had ordered. It’s titled A Universal History of Blackbird Sightings. It came neatly wrapped in a newspaper sheet taken from a nineteen thirty-six issue of The Birdland Gazette. April twenty-second, it was dated. A quick internet search returned no results for that name.
Inside the book, opened to a random page, I read about the story of a man who had been told about the “blackbird legend” in his early teens by a math teacher and went through life paying particular attention to every blackbird sighting that occurred to him, without ever telling anyone. Until one day, he received a book in the mail by mistake, containing the narration of his ultimate fate, one day in the future, upon the sight of a solitary blackbird whose feathers were said to be “blacker than black.” He then wrote a letter to a close friend, finally revealing his blackbird sightings and their origins, as well as sharing the peculiar story he found in the book, with the sole purpose of leaving a trace in case what the book said would happen, happened.
I’m also writing because I saw a blackbird today, right after I closed that book, at four forty-four in the afternoon. A blackbird blacker than black. If you don’t hear from me again after midnight, don’t do anything.
As nothing can be done.
"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.
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OMG! 😱 PLEASE send out something more — anything!! written after midnight!!
“If you don’t hear from me again after midnight, don’t do anything.
As nothing can be done.”
What a perfect ending, Silvio👏💛