Thomas told me this. We were saying goodbye beneath the pre war apartment building where he lives in down town Dakar. From his 10th floor studio you can see the Atlantic on both sides of the sliver thin Cap-Vert Peninsula. On the streets below business men, and hustlers, fruit sellers and cell phone credit vendors weave busily back and forth.

I met Thomas in Mali covering the French intervention earlier this year. We both made it to Timbuktu. He managed to get a lift on a French helicopter, I spent two days driving across the desert. It was good to see him again where things were more relaxed. We ate at a classy, but funky restaurant, he bought fruit.

I went back to my hotel, thinking about those wish birds. I wondered if the seller had trained them to fly back to a rooftop roost each night. Did that mean the wish didn’t count? Or was that just being efficient and thrifty. I think I would want my wish bird to fly back to be sold again as a wish to someone else.

The transition from life in a cage to life as a feral wish couldn’t be an easy.

But maybe that was the point.