I KNOW it’s an illusion. I know that the wild doves I leave birdseed for every morning grow old and die, as all creatures do, but when you can’t tell one dove from another and you never see any dove eggs, it’s easy to believe they’re immortal.
Daughter dove replaces her dying mother, and since their faces are indistinguishable, the one becomes the other. The daughter is an impostor of the mother, and her daughter will be an impostor of her. In a confusion of gray pigeons, there’s always that one tan pigeon. Doves are more anonymous. Even if I stared at them every morning for a month and tried to assign them names, would I ever be able to learn what face belonged to which dove, much less which dove had what name? To me they all look the same, so the flock appears frozen in time.