It’s a myth that birds will reject their young if they’ve been handled by humans: birds, as it turns out, actually have very small olfactory nerves. Once or maybe more than once a person had the opposite problem and their lover smelled like someone else. I’m inclined to find this to be a myth as well but it’s hard not to notice that there are so many people in the world and there have been so many more that are dead now and there are so so many things that have happened. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. This is the number one thing I would choose to say if I could only say one thing for the rest of my life.
What a totally quirky fact to have this really specific hypothetical thing about yourself that you’ve decided on. Collect these things and you can tell them to the people you smell like in bed in the morning. You can be turned away from them at the time and then turn toward them sheepishly. You can have different facts or tell them all the same things spread out over all the mornings. Talking in bed ought to be easiest, lying together there. The word is polysemy: there is no other way than to be lying in bed together. Tricky, isn’t it.
Still, when a bird is dying you don’t really know what to do. Hold it? Does that make it better? Birds don’t lie down, they just perch. It’s hard to know what to do with a perched-something dying. But when you’re lying there together it’s so easy to tell.