On Flight

I often try to fly, forgetting I don’t have wings.  Eyes closed, next to an open window, soaring downhill on a bicycle, the necessity of feathers fades away, as the wind picks apart individual hairs and invites them to dance.  I could attempt a flap, I could perhaps take off, if I found a high enough perch, but the angers of reality keep me grounded.

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On the floating bridge, I look at the roils beneath.  I can feel the unstable bounds of earth quivering.  For a moment, I want to dive low, like Javert, to feel weightlessness, then a cold press.  I can not.  The consequences of being unable to soar up, after diving down, are too grim.

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In dreams, flight is not the same.  There, in the misty confusion, it is always a sort of float.  You are a leaf caught in the wind, not a magician.

There is something much more appealing to the thought of hollow bones pounding through the air, defying gravity, choosing when and how.

Of feathers spread wide to feel a warm up current.

Of the ground growing closer and farther at your command, rising and falling.

You become the wind.  You create it.

As a group, we have conquered flight, but not in the proper way.  Not in the way that catches your breath and causes you to laugh at the beauty.

We have discovered the flight of a lumbering beetle.  Powerful, but without grace.  Heavy and confined.

Until my bones melt away from the interior, and my downed arms grow into colorful appendages, the perfection of flight will escape me, and I will be unable to escape the crushing earth.