Once, I was taking a shower in the afternoon. My bathroom door was ajar, and I suddenly heard someone whistling a tune of some sort. It wasn’t in the distance but right there in the bathroom with me. I nearly panicked and started yelling, “Get out of here!” not knowing what to expect. I pulled back the shower curtain, fully anticipating a scene from Psycho, but… instead of an intruder, all I saw was a tiny blur of feathers perched on the edge of the sink. A small parakeet—green, yellow, and curious—looked at me with its head tilted as if I had interrupted its afternoon routine. My fear instantly dissolved into confusion. How did a bird get into my bathroom? I stood there, dripping water and holding the curtain like a shield, while the little visitor hopped twice and whistled the same tune I had heard moments earlier. The tension in my chest evaporated, replaced by a soft laugh at how dramatically wrong my assumptions had been.
I wrapped myself in a towel and slowly approached the parakeet, not wanting to scare it further. The bird didn’t back away; instead, it fluttered to the top of the mirror and chirped as though it recognized me. That’s when I remembered my neighbor, Mrs. Garvey, mentioning her beloved bird had flown out during a window-cleaning mishap earlier that week. She had been devastated, posting flyers and asking everyone to keep an eye out. I whispered, “Buddy… are you Mango?”—the parakeet’s name. To my surprise, the bird whistled again, a little melody I suddenly recognized from evenings when I’d hear Mrs. Garvey singing to him through our shared wall.
