On Hawks and Hunger

My mom goes out to lunch with friends, and sees a red-tailed hawk. It is sitting on the lowest rung of a fire escape ladder on an apartment building in Fordham, blocking her way past. They lock eyes, neither one wanting to move before the other. When my mother, the bold woman from the Bronx she is, decides she has spent enough time marveling at nature, she leaves. So does the hawk. The next day at lunch, the same thing happens. The hawk stares at her, cocks his head. She does not move, only watches. It lets her get within arms length. “He is trying to tell me something,” she says, “—hawks are messengers.” That same week, she learns she is pregnant with me

I am a baby. I am stoic. I rarely cry. They think there is something wrong with me. They decide there is not. I am quiet, says my father, and even as a toddler I am considerably, noticeably strange for my intensity. I am always moving, climbing up everything I can, seeking heights and experiences I am not yet strong enough for. I dream about jumping from the treetops I have clambered up and flying all the way down.

I am thirteen. Something is off with me. I feel wrong in my body, like something is fighting to get out from inside of me. My peers know it too, they whisper about me behind my back. They won’t speak to me. They sense what I do not yet know. I find solace in spaces that were not made for me, spaces online and spaces in between. I am terrified to find something out about myself that I am not ready to know. 

I am fourteen, and the world is shut inside. My life becomes significantly less connected. I am terrified of everything, including myself. I see birds outside often. I start walking more. My bed becomes my only bastion. Despite my best efforts, I get sick this year. 

I am fifteen. I have not yet recovered. I can’t walk as far, or move as much. I start seeing doctors. They don’t know how to help me, they say I am too young to be this sick. I am terrified to admit that I am not well, and I am even more afraid of asking for help. But I will have to learn.

I am seventeen. I leave my childhood home. The weight of watering down my identity weighs heavy on my confidence. My body is starting to fail me. I start college in two days. I am struggling to walk my dog when I see a red-tailed hawk. It sits on a utility pole, so close that I can see its eyes. It’s staring at me. I call my mom and she does not answer. I stay, I get low to the ground, and watch it. We all sit there for an hour.  It does not leave until I do. My little dog is terrified. I tell my mom when I get home. “Hawks are messengers,” she says. I come out as transgender. 

I am eighteen. I am only getting sicker. I am unwilling to let it slow me, it does so anyway. I want to be well and I am not. I have spent the last few months beginning a medical transition that my mom openly does not support. I have spent years now learning to twist myself into ribbons, to dilute myself as not to disturb her, when my mom sees another red-tailed hawk. 

We had spent that week fostering a baby rabbit and avoiding the subject of my changing body and my unrelated failing health. She found it bloody in the yard, saved it from a cat, and now we keep and bottle-feed it. My mom is in the backyard drinking morning coffee when a hawk swoops low over her head and latches onto a healthy adult rabbit eating clovers in the lawn. All three creatures have served themselves breakfast, and horrible as it is, they must eat.

My mom starts to shout, to throw rocks at it and wave her arms and scream until it stops and flies away. When she is sure she has denied the hawk its meal, she sits back down. It returns and flies at her, swoops low at her head, and only at the last second does it scream at her and fly away. It lands in a tree, and for the next day it does not stray far, staying on trees and power lines, surveilling my family. It’s warning us, or maybe, it is daring us to come closer. “It came so close to me,” my mom says, “—within inches. I could see it so perfectly. Every feather. Bastard thing.”

I listen to her speak about the hawk while I drip feed the tiny rabbit in my lap and wonder how she still cannot see my reflection in their eyes. Does she believe this is a tale of triumph? That she is saving the rabbit from the hawk, from the cat, saving her daughter from myself, does she not see that we are starving? Why does she deny me my meal when she disagrees with its contents? She can only accept what is passive, acceptable. I am only approved of when I sustain myself on grasses and inoffensive liquids, despite my need for soft fur and round bodies, blood and bones and testosterone. She can only stand to see me for my feathers, and ignores my beak, my talons, my aching body, my hunger. I am sure she thinks I am biting the hand that feeds me, but I have been so very hungry and I will bite the first thing that bleeds. I’m not proud of it, but everything needs to eat.

We let the baby bunny go in September. I get my falconry license in August.