The chains trail her feet and hands as she lingered along the bars of her cage staring through. She saw nothing but the tiny patch of azure blue sky. Her pale white complexion showed age long traces of tear stains. From the day she was born to the day she stands here now, her skin is virgin to the warm sky. Her piercing black eyes widened at the rare sight of the soaring bird. She longed to spread her wings and join it, but her wings have been broken and bent by the people she called masters.

How could one acknowledge and respect such people despite how much they pamper her. Her masters loved her voice and often would ask her to sing. But what she longed the most she knew she could not get. Every night she buried her head down as she curled to sleep, eternally hoping to see a way out of the cage.

Like every living thing, she grew older and older. Her voice slowly eaten up by the disease of old age and as she curled in her cold cage one night, she heard the whispers of her masters. Where they finally going to free her from her weary cage she wondered, to her dismay they were not freeing her. They were releasing from what life had brought her. Born in a cage, die in a cage; she wanted to be free for the last time. She begged silently in her heart with all her soul to be free, to find a way out and to soar into the infinite cerulean sky.

That night, a great storm rattled the window panes of her master’s house. In her greatest moment of despair, god had decided to give her a chance. For as the storm shook the cage, the cage tipped and fell. The cage door slid open and for the first time in her life, freedom was not merely a dream, it was a sheer few inches away. Freedom is all for her to take. She closed her eyes and savored the moment: the day, the instant she spread her broken wings, the feel of the wind pushing her light frame higher and higher into the air.

To the everlasting skies her heart exclaimed, it didn’t matter if her feathers were wet or that her ruined wings were no longer supporting her. She was free and to the last moment, she enjoyed it. She was no longer the bird who lived and died in a cage. She was the bird who died with freedom in her wings.