what could i prepare for the departure day, or all i could do is comfort myself with the readied schedules, the maps at bay, and relentlessly conjure up the roads i would cross. last night, i ran into fragmented timelapses, a little birdie that lost its way hovered around the house while i was listening to the outer room's breaths echoing the repeated sound of a hammock swinging from the inner room, the silent intervals rope-tied in my chest, and i was out of breath because of the anaerobic envisagings, the tangled fingers hiding in your hair, at times they told me that they were sediments lying at the bottom of the depleted rivers, for years, they had been thinking of a nameless aquatic plant, nostalgia brought them here, to dive into your hair while you washed it in the afternoon in the red-tiled backyard corner, at times they recited songs whose flows synced with the river’s current and enticed me to set off, to the sea, to the vast pasture-side, i replied, every direction would be vast, wait, don’t distract me from the fledgling's wings, i was watching it search for a way out, but it kept flapping its wings around the corner of the mosquito net covering the bed my father used to sleep in, right above his head, non-stop, it came to reveal tufts of yellow abdominal feathers, it could neither be a zosterop nor a flowerpecker, i guessed, without a shrill of panic, it circled around, around, my memories of a decided location, somewhere i used to hide a map leading to Yunnan, where three rivers flowed parallel to each other, one of which was linked to the Southern region called Mekong, on the southside of Yunnan, and also on my southside, because of one simple reason: i was born in the North, oh so i would regard the fingers nestled in your hair to be on my heartside, the side where tears often well up, i fumbled for the map to Yunnan only to realize that it was kept in an old chest that i named loss, i was panic-driven for a moment, had i just searched for loss, yes, just like the way the fingers lurked in your hair, i was the muddy soil, thinking of that, the cacophony of the little birdie’s flapping wings cut me off midstream, when i turned around, it dawned on me that my dad had long since passed away, i shuddered to think, why hadn’t the bird flown away?