Here is how I discovered the meaning of the word, “sky.”
I was six years old, and although I don’t remember much about that age, I do remember that the first direction I looked every time I stepped outside was upward. In suburban Illinois, I was either met by the dark gray underbellies of gathering clouds or dense sheets of plunging rain.
Today, though, an expanse of cerulean stretched above me, broken only by the small, feathery shapes that formed a wide V-shape across the blue. They winged their way toward the horizon in perfect, unflinching formation.
“Canadian geese,” I later learned. For years after, I found myself enchanted by any creature with wings. I tore through every bird-related book I could get my hands on during elementary school. I tracked each American robin that darted above my street, and learned the rhythms of the red-bellied woodpeckers rapping on the trees lining the sidewalk.
Even today, I can’t picture a sky without a flock of geese moving steadily across it, each pair of wings rising and falling like an eddy in a river. Some part of me has always been jealous, I think, of that innate compass that seems to thrum between their hollow bones. That sense that brings them home to their nests, and then halfway across the world, and then back again, with a certainty that I’ve been chasing ever since I learned how to look up.
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It wasn’t until after I moved to sunny Southern California—after I noticed the birds appearing in the autumn and disappearing in the spring—that I began to research with intention, or as much intention as a seven-year-old can have.
The core of migration is simple: Birds do it to survive.
But the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated. About 20 percent of the world’s bird species embark on sweeping, large-scale seasonal journeys in search of essential resources. Birds generally move northward during springtime toward regions rich in insects, plants, and nesting locations. In the winter, once those resources begin to run dry, they reverse their path and head southward to warmer climates again.
Scientists have categorized migrating birds based on the distances they travel: from permanent residents that stay rooted in one location year-round to medium-distance migrants that fly for a few hundred miles.
Arguably most striking are long-distance migrants, who travel distances and heights difficult to even comprehend. The bar-headed goose soars from areas of East Asia to its wintering grounds in India; on its way over the Himalayas, it can survive on less than 10 percent of oxygen available at sea level while reaching altitudes of up to 7,000 meters. The bar-tailed godwit migrates from Alaska to New Zealand in a nonstop journey every year, traversing over 11,000 kilometers without ever stopping to eat or even to land. And the arctic tern travels 90,000 kilometers from Greenland to the southern Weddell Sea every single year, the longest migration in the animal kingdom that we know of today. Arctic terns can live for over 30 years, meaning that throughout their lives they may fly an equivalent distance of three round trips to the moon.
All this to say: There is an astonishing amount of muscle and endurance packed into every small airborne dot that we’ve learned to take for granted. All this to say: I am fairly confident there are worse things in the world around us to be captivated by.
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My high school graduation ceremony was held on our football field at dusk. Our town is small enough that I could name and recite the trite gossip about every student in my year, the people I’d grown up with since first grade. The sun slipped beneath the distant yellow hills as speaker after speaker took the stage, as each of us walked across the turf and prayed not to trip, as the hours rolled by.
And then it was over. We sprang to our feet and threw our caps into the air, tumbled onto each other amidst a storm of falling tassels. I flung my arms around my friends’ necks and laughed through tears. Call me—visit me—the future's so bright, we told each other, over and over. But I could never quite find the words to describe the deep ache settling in my bones, the sensation of missing all my friends months before they even left. The floodlights tinted everyone’s edges hazy golden, already fading into the soft evening air. I thought of tassels scattering like feathers. I thought of Canadian geese and faraway wings and migrations away from each other.
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The week I moved in at Brown, I spent my days in an indescribably overwhelming blur of introductions, lunches, and exchanging contacts. When I returned to my dorm at night, I spent hours on my phone scrolling down internet rabbit holes, too jetlagged and keyed up to sleep.
During this time, I read about Zugunruhe: a German term for the “migratory restlessness” that comes right before animals undertake their annual journeys. Birds under human care have been observed to display a burst of energy in the fall and spring, fluttering their wings and hopping in place. When placed on ink pads inside tall paper funnels with a view of the night sky, birds leave a cluster of footprints in the direction of their natural migratory path. Some part of them simply seems to know where to go, when to do it.
I killed countless hours during the first few months of school simply walking through campus, circling around the Main Green or trekking down to Jo’s or investigating every last corner in the Rock. It took a far shorter time than I thought for me to grow comfortable with New England, with its temperamental sunshine and clouds. Still, though, I saw the Santa Monica mountains when I closed my eyes, rolling hills and wide dusty trails, crows’ nests perched atop curling coastal oaks.
I watched my step count on my phone tick up and up. Whenever I sat stationary for more than an hour, I felt the itch to move, to migrate. To where, I didn't know—only that there was another place else I needed to be, on the other side of campus, back in California. I missed my friends with an unrelenting ache. My feet carried me in every direction at once and all of them felt like home, and none of them felt right.
Meanwhile, I began to notice the eastern bluebirds swooping over my head, and the American robins that gathered outside my window. The leaves turned brown. I kept looking up.
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Besides their internal clock, birds migrate using three known compasses: the sun’s position, the constellations, and the planet’s magnetic field. Juveniles begin their seasonal flights using inherited instincts to simply “fly south.” As they take the same journey annually throughout their maturation, they are able to hone their mental maps with incredible precision, sometimes to the point of returning to the very same perches year after year.
In comparison, my flight to Pittsburgh was nothing. I spent Thanksgiving break at Carnegie Mellon visiting my childhood friend; the past three months were the longest we’d been apart in 12 years. In the evenings, I curled up at the foot of her twin XL, talking for hours about our high school friendships now scattered from San Diego to Shanghai, our growing up, our distance in between. In the daytime, I trailed her around her new home, watched her turn down streets I didn’t know the names of, greet faces I didn’t recognize.
In the moments in between, I saw her eight-year-old self stretching to life beneath her shoulders—bright-eyed and California-tanned, calluses from the playground monkey bars dotting her palms. Then I blinked and then she was all grown up again, in a life all her own. I was a visitor in the nest she’d built.
And yet her dorm felt like coming home, simply by virtue of her presence, and the magnetic pull in my chest. When I flew back to Providence, I still felt that pull. Sometimes I think some part of me is a compass needle and it spins in the direction of everyone I’ve ever loved, and it’s always spinning. An impossible amount of migrations to make. A world full of safe places to land.
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Outside my house is an avocado tree that’s been there ever since we moved in; five years ago a mother sparrow constructed her nest there. I watched, rapt from my window, as her eggs became chicks, then fledglings, then gone. The next year she returned to her empty nest, hopped around it for days, as if in confusion.
I remembered her when I stepped back into my childhood bedroom over winter break: the walls and shelves half-bare, the rest of my possessions in Providence. My photo strips from senior prom and my May 2024 calendar were still pinned to my bulletin board. Like the sparrow, I circled the space over and over as if seeing it for the first time.
It wasn’t until I reunited with my family and my friends that the unfamiliarity began to dissipate. Even though I kept running into the corner of the towel rack in front of my bathroom, even though I’d forgotten the route I’d taken every week to Costco, I fit into the crooks of people’s arms and collarbones as if we hadn’t been apart for more than a day.
So it was easy to pretend, to slip back into the skin of the person I’d been before college. Sitting shotgun in my friends’ cars, or scaling the hilly hiking trails that hem the borders of my town, or waking up to familiar doves crooning outside my window. Everything else too began to slide back into place. Sometimes I could forget I’d ever even left California at all.
But I couldn’t ignore the unease that coiled in my stomach during the quiet moments: a feeling that, when I looked out the window at the dried grass and trees, I should be seeing bare oaks and a blanket of snow instead. A sense that I was both home and so very far away from it. I felt that restlessness again, that pull in my chest—this time, in two dozen different directions. My college friends were now scattered across the country and the songbird in my chest longed to fly to them, everywhere, all over. Simply put: I missed them so much it scared me a little.
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There must be something in the fact that the older we get, the more places we learn to inhabit, and the more people we learn to love. There must be something in the fact that growing up is simply getting better at saying hellos, goodbyes, hellos again.
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We still don’t quite know how migration evolved in the first place. What drove the first thrush or starling or sparrow to lift her wings and leave her whole world behind? Was it purely for survival, as her normal home grew barren in the winter and her stomach growled with hunger? Was it a deep-seated genetic instinct, a sporadic mutation in her DNA that would be passed down through generations, a physical urge to move? Was it simply an accident, a flight blown off course, or a spur of the moment?
I’m still chasing certainty in a lot of things, and I can’t pretend to know the answer to this one. But sometimes I like to think that something more than genetics and physical instinct pulls birds from home to home. A yearning like an echo through their hollow bones. An ancestral nest, and the desire to build another, to return to the place that shaped them.
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I came home to Providence after winter break, put my suitcase down in my dorm, and imagined something in my chest clicking back into place. So many of the birds around campus are gone now; the trees are quieter. I hope we’ve switched places, and they’re basking in warm golden sunlight, the promise of New England summer thrumming far off in their minds.
And as I spent the next few days enveloped with hugs, questions of “how was your break,” and exclamations of “it’s been forever”—as I traversed ice and snow on the way to class—as I settled back into the familiarity of my friends and the rhythm of our conversations, I couldn’t help but feel warm too.
Sometimes I wish that I could collect every person I love into one city, even one building, to have my entire network an arm's length away: But I think that might just be the nature of it all. Caring comes hand in hand with missing people, and I am always missing someone. And yet my longing is far outweighed by my gratitude that I have places and people to long for.
In the meantime, I have late-night conversations in dingy lounges, the feel of me and three of my friends sprawled across a single bed, the quiet walks, and the loud laughter. In the meantime, I’m familiarizing myself with the cross-country journeys and the nests on either end. I’ve made peace with the fact that we are always in motion. That home can be present in so many places at once, and everyone can be right. I stretch my affection over the distances; it grows tenfold as it goes.
Nowadays, I still stop to watch the geese soar across the blue every time I see them, navigating on the basis of nothing but a feeling, and that feeling is everything. The migrations we choose, the people we cross the skies for. We love with abandon. We leave our houses to come home.
