We had a falling out.
Hope is an eternal spring in the human breast and we kept at it like wind-up toys, model airplanes in dogfights, spitting fire.
When I’m around her, I think it’s her fault. When I’m not, I think that it’s mine. That’s the way it tends to be; you only feel remorse when there’s nothing to be done.
I look down at myself and the ground far beneath me. Something wells up from my chest and catches in my throat. I wince as I swallow.
I have been hoping for far too long unrewarded. I take leaps of faith and crash to the ground. No wings are spread to catch the air and slow my fall.
But I kept hoping nonetheless. No grapes are too sour for my palate, no fruit too tantalizingly far out of reach. I bought her strawberries and fruit baskets. I bought myself time.
I dream of her and I dream of flying. I dream of stretching out my arms and taking flight. I dream of reaching out my hands and taking hers.
My imagination stretches, wings unfurling, feathers like blades to cut the ties of gravity. It sheds chrysalis fluids like tears, sheds the dead weight of reality.
I see her momentary face in a speeding cloud, an outstretched hand of cumulus which seems so close that it could brush my face.
I reach for her, reach out for someone out of reach, something as high as my hopes.
I reach for the sky, blue and empty as her eyes but for those passing clouds, rolling, rolling.
My fingers graze against nothing, and I hold on tightly to it.
Butterflies lurch in my stomach and I feel light-headed and weightless.
I’m falling.
I don’t know how long it takes me to realize it. Time seems to slow. By the time I realize I’m not standing on anything, that I’m twisting and turning in the air, several seconds have gone by.
I hear wind streaming past my ears. I’m falling fast. I wonder why I haven’t hit the ground yet.
Thousand one, thousand two. Stop counting, you have better things to do with your last seconds!
Thousand three, thousand four… I feel much calmer than I really should be.
Thousand five, thousand six— alright, something’s up. I should have hit the ground by now, I think.
Thousand seven, thousand eight.
I try to twist and turn my body around so I can get a look at the ground.
There isn’t any ground.
I twist and turn some more. No ground anywhere.
I blink wind-born tears from my eyes. Wind-born tears, I’m sure.
I think I see a bird a little while off. I’ve been counting for around four minutes. I’m beginning to suspect that I’m not actually falling— or if I am, I’m not falling down to earth. Thus, I am thankful for the bird; it’s a sign of reality reasserting itself; if there are birds, there must be land, right? Birds need somewhere to land, like islands of solidity in an endless blue sea of sky.
So I’m going to land.
Considering my current velocity, that’s concerning.
The bird gets closer. I’m definitely seeing it, now. It’s not just a speck in my eye brought into my awareness by its sharp contrast with the light blue sky; it’s a fluttering, moving thing, with wings. Large, feathery wings.
But it isn’t a bird, I realize.
It’s a person.
I try to yell something, but I can barely hear myself over the rushing of the air past my ears.
“Hey!” I scream louder. “Hello!”
The person flies closer. An angel, I wonder, or something— someone— like it. A woman, and she flies. Black eyes glint at me; sunglasses. She’s wearing thick pants and a sweater. I realize how cold it is, and shiver, and wonder why it isn’t colder.
She gets closer, matching my speed until it looked like she was simply standing beside me. With my eyes fixed on her, I almost felt like I wasn’t falling anymore, merely floating along with my winged visitor.
She grabbed me, flipped the both of us upside down, and started flying us downwards— upwards, I realized, since I was still dizzy and disoriented from being flipped upside down. I must have been upside down from her perspective, I realized.
“Thanks!” I yelled, but was drowned out by the heavy downstrokes of her wings; huge wings, white and wide as bedsheets, attached to her lower back a hand’s breadth from her hips. Powerful, muscular things, I think, to carry the both of us.
I can’t look at the ground beneath us, as it shines a blinding white; clouds, I realize, not the ground, and hurting my eyes with reflected sunlight. We drop closer and closer, despite the flying woman flapping upwards and slowing our descent. For several seconds, it seems like my foot is about to touch them, but that is but an illusion wrought by the unending field of clouds and the fact that their size or distance is impossible to tell, especially with the speed at which we are falling, controlled as the fall might be— as I hope that it is. In the blink of an eye we’re in it; I didn’t even have time to realize that we were finally going in, only that we had already entered a whole new world of shadowy whiteness.
And then we’re out, and the real ground, the true ground that does not hurt to look at but hurts to hit, is below us, and I can see trees and realize just how fast we’re going, vertically and horizontally, excitingly and horrifyingly fast. The earth speeds towards us as slow as a bullet and as fast as a snail, a circular horizon spinning and shrinking and growing all at once as we fly into it.
I closed my eyes, involuntarily. Every time a wingbeat sent a shock through me I thought we had hit the ground and died, though I knew that I would not feel a thing.
I wondered how much time I had left. I realized that I didn’t feel the wind rushing past as strongly now, and that there was silence between the soft yet violent fluttering drumming of the wings. I opened my eyes again; we were nearly there.
But we were moving slowly. We had decelerated enough that the ground— or our impact with it— posed no danger to us, provided that my saviour continued flying as she was now. And this time it really was flying; not a battle against our combined momentum, inertia sending us hurtling earthwards like feathered falling stars, but flight, real flight, the kind that man has always dreamed of. The rush of wind no longer felt threatening or alien, but exhilarating. I held on tight to her shoulders and to the miracle of flight which had saved me; I was safe in the arms of a fellow human, safe behind the wings of a majestic bird.
We land as soft as eider down. I have not done anything the entire flight, and yet I feel as tired as if I had somehow flown all the way up and down myself.
It felt like waking up from a dream, or a nightmare, or real life, to find oneself with your feet on solid ground and your head still in the clouds.
I wheeze out thanks, not as gracious as I would like, but circumstances and weakness of breath show gratitude better than I ever could.
The flying woman also has to catch her breath. She folds her wings behind her, two great feathered sails practising precise origami motions until they nestle into each other and close to her like a fluffy white backpack.
I was astounded by how human she looked. She was human, was she not? I thought of birds and insects and bats and flying things that cut the air with strange, streamlined shapes, and wondered how she did it with a mostly human form, human but for the great wings on her back, a single concession to mass, gravity, and reality.
This isn’t real, I think. Not really. I don’t think I’m dead, or dreaming, or imagining this— but all the same it isn’t really real. Not like back home. Not in the same way. I close my eyes, rub at them a bit, let out the breath I realize I’d been holding since I hit the ground.
I hear the beating of wings and look up to see more of the flying people, wings fantastic and clothes mundane, pigeon wings and eagle wings and crow wings, corduroy and bomber jackets and plaid, a mad quilt exploded with feathers swirling all about, drifting and settling down to the ground.
“What’s happened to his wings?,” says one of them, in English, which somehow doesn’t surprise me. It sounds perfectly normal but for a sing-song accent, half-pleasant, half-grating. He sings it to the beat of the pulsing blood in my ears.
“Never had any,” I cough, and wheeze a bit more.
“Then how’d you get all the way up there? We hardly ever fly up there. Columbia here was almost two miles away when she first saw you. You’re lucky she did.”
I turned to her, to Columbia, and wheezed a slightly louder “thank you”, coughed, and then panted, hands on knees, a little while more. I felt a kind of delirium leave me, and I wondered if I had at any point passed out earlier due to low oxygen. How thin does the air get, I wondered, between one world and the next?
“So,” I said, “where am I? What world is this?”
“Earth,” said the main speaker, somewhat confused, though I realized that if she spoke English then of course I must be on Earth… or someplace related to it, like a face in a dream relates to the masquerade of many mugs one sees in the real world.
“And you all have wings here?” My cough was lighter now.
“Of course. It is the birthright of man to have wings, to fly. Even when, tired, we fold our wings to fall asleep, we dream of it.” She stepped closer. “I would assume you were the victim— or punished perpetrator— of some great and terrible crime, were it not for your confused mental state and the strange circumstances of your retrieval. Tell me, where do you come from?”
“Earth,” I said. “Perhaps not the same one as yours. I… fell here, I think.” I told the flock my name, my address, my country. Things were different here, I learned. Dreamlike, almost, in their aberrations.
And similar, too. And one of the similarities was—
I had gone missing. That is to say—
There’s another me. There was another me, rather; had been, had my name, had my face, had wings, had a better life than I ever had, from what I can tell. The natives here knew me; I didn’t know them. They were unfamiliar despite their claims that I was, or had been, family; not that I, this me, could have been family, of course. Not without wings. And not that I could have had a life here, either; I was as obsolete as the dodo.
They conducted examinations on me, to figure out if I actually was him; tested my memory and my reactions to his close friends, checked my back for signs of clipped-off wings.
Eventually, they concluded that I was not him, and I felt relieved— but not only because, as I had worried about earlier, they might or might not believe me, but because I too had been getting worried that I was him; that I might merely be crazy and injured, unsound in body and mind; but no. I could thank a freak of nature for my normalcy, could claim an ordinary origin in an extraordinary land, a strange place where everybody walks about on their feet all the time. It felt wonderful to know that I was a monster from an alien world.
This was not my home; I was as far from home as daydreams are from a nine-to-five; and still it comforted me, for at least my home was not this place. My feelings of unfamiliarity were justified.
And I had never had wings; I had not lost a thing; and still it stung a little.
I wondered if there was another her, too.
No, I found out. There wasn’t anybody like that. That was a relief, I thought, and I realized that I hadn’t known what I had been hoping for. Maybe it would have been a relief either way.
Maybe my world was the only place in the universe with her in it; that in however many worlds there might be in this sea of endless sky, mine was unique in that fashion. I hoped so. I didn’t want to meet her again, I thought.
And whenever I thought I saw her face in one of the flocks here that stain the sky like rippling ink, my heart skipped a beat. And I was left with crushed hopes, somehow.
Sometimes I was almost surprised that I couldn’t fly; I’d see the others do it, and I’d somehow stretch, would reach, and would utterly fail to tear myself from the ground. And so I would simply walk to where they were going, slowly and laboriously, without shoes. I had tried to ask for shoes; I had not received any; they did not know what they were. The people here talked often about my requests for footwear, and why I might need it; “in his homeland,” they would say, “people rub their feet against the ground so often that they must cover them in case they are ground away, like a gramophone needle that has worn away into bluntness— and then,” they say, “they can no longer balance upon their feet.”
I often tried to correct them about this, but the legends persisted. As did my odd feelings about not having wings; I found myself moving out of the way of things, as if I was worried that my wings would brush up against them. I thought about old men and women, back home, who had their legs cut off, and reported feeling shooting pains and cramps in long-gone feet.
I had thought that this place was more like earth than it was. It was mostly the globes and maps; the globes tricked me. There had been one in my room for weeks; I’d inspected it right away, hadn’t seen any differences between landmasses and such. I’d thought the planet must be the same, in design if not in location; I’d studied the maps and some of the history books, and found nothing to persuade me otherwise, not that I ever truly thought about the possibility.
I realized the lie in the maps when I was on a train; they did have trains here, thank goodness, for distances too long to simply fly. Other vehicles could be dispensed with, but for long-distance ships, trains, and the occasional wagon for moving goods about.
I had been poring over another book the good people at the university, those who had examined me, had lent me, for they thought it best if my reports on my home, my native world, were made with knowledge of what things were like here, for comparison.
It was only when I looked up from the book, however, that I discovered my first error from which I unraveled so many of the rest.
There was a mountain in the distance, and a mountain it was, though I doubted it at first; a work of geology writ large, towering, ponderous. Oddly thin, oddly tapered, like a trumpet-shaped flower turned upside down.
It shouldn’t be that thin at the top, I realized. It’s wrong. Mountains are stubbier than that. They have cone shapes, not trumpet shapes.
I asked my traveling companion, Columbia, the lady who had rescued me, now assigned to university studies involving me, if all mountains looked like that.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Most of them. Some are a bit taller. Some are a bit stubbier.”
Oh. Huh. “Why does it get dramatically thinner the higher it gets?”
“Sperocline phase shift. Gravity, and reality, gets a lot lighter the higher up you go; at a certain point, it gets light enough that the mountain can get much thinner while still staying stable. You don’t have that?”
I shook my head, silent. Another thing to go in the book, though I wasn’t quite so worried about that yet. My brain was kicked into greater motion, a careful franticness, the kind of feeling you have when crossing a tightrope that you really don’t want to be on, that might collapse at any moment. Dizziness threatened; the ‘sperocline’ was a thing; what else had I missed?
I rummaged through my backpack, looking for a book about this world that wasn’t just maps, one that might have information about planets and geology, astronomy and physics. There; here’s one.
How big is the earth?, I wonder, and correct myself. How big is this earth?
Diameter: around four thousand miles. Is it the same mile?, I wonder, and think: yes, probably, but it’s worth checking. It is; and feet aren’t going to be that changed, because our feet are the same. Okay.
This is a small planet. Four thousand miles is a lot, but… I think earth, the real earth, the earth without winged people and books about sperocline layers, the earth with shoes and taxis, is much larger; twice as wide, I think, though I’m not certain. That means… and I scribble down some calculations on a piece of paper, to make sure I’m not forgetting anything… that this place has only a quarter of the surface area, and an eighth of the volume, roughly speaking.
I feel an awful sense of claustrophobia, a sudden dizzying sensation of the whole world shrinking, as if it had taken me until now to realize that I had been living in a land of dollhouses and miniature chairs. I felt tiny and huge all at once.
The globes hadn’t shown anything. They’d been the same size as the ones back home. But the globes don’t have to be smaller just because the planet is, you idiot. Of course they’re going to be the same size.
And it finally sinks in, with a sinking feeling, that I am truly far from home. No rumbling trains nor rustling wings will rock me back home again. I’m stranded here, I realized. On some other world, as strange and familiar as a dream. Far away from everyone I’d ever known. From her.
She’d wanted space. That was a relief, I’d thought bitterly. It’s the one thing I can give her.
And now I was beyond the end of the sky.
I wondered if she wondered where I was.
She probably thought I had up and left.
She wasn’t wrong.
I wondered if she appreciated that.
I had given her all the space in the world.
I talked about her, occasionally, to Columbia. To the person who had welcomed me into this world, flown me down on gleaming wings. Who today was sitting next to me, occasionally idly scratching at those same wings, furling and unfurling them, as she always did; and she responded, as she always did, but this time with a hint more of concern.
“You know you really need to get that checked— it shouldn’t be persisting this long.”
“What?”
“Look… any real
love that you might have had for her was likely left at home. With
her.”
“I’m pretty sure that I still… well, I don’t
know if I love her still… that’s what I’m trying to process…
but her being distant is no object. She doesn’t need to be here for
me to love her.”
Her eyes were unreadable behind her sunglasses; her face was still and calm. “If she isn’t here, how can you love her? Could she detect that you love her? Aside from that— how could we detect if the object of your affection is even real? You say such strange and illogical things… not all of us think you are sane, you know. We have no reason to believe that she exists, and if she doesn’t exist then how on earth could you love her?”
“I think she exists. And if I think so then I can love her.”
“And if you can love her independently of whether or not she exists… then how can you claim to love her? And not the dream of her, the idea of her, the image of her?”
We both must have realized, then, that things were different in our respective homelands. We sat quiet for a minute, trying to understand each other; birds sang outside. I wondered if the birds here sang for mates and territory, like they did back home; it seemed unfitting, somehow, but the thought was comforting. Perhaps I was not the only one wishing, though my wishes were not quite so musical.
I hope she exists. Even if I never see her again, even if I meet her again and she leaves me for good this time, even if I go home and find her dead… I hope she exists, I think. I am sad and I am lonely and I want to go home.
“Well, I hope so. I hope I can love her, even if I don’t,” I said, finally. I looked up at Columbia. Maybe that was enough.
“And why?”
“It would be good.” There.
“No, no— why? What is your hope founded upon?”
“I mean— don’t you hope? I know you do.” And “This is a lovely place,” I added. “Very hopeful.”
“Of course I hope. 65%.”
“What?”
“65%. That’s how much hope I have. Last time I checked, at least.” She shrugged. “It changes sometimes.”
“What does that even mean? Are you talking about belief? Your belief in something?”
“No, no. We’ve got it all on spreadsheets. On tables and charts and in our calculating machines. The reasons for hopes. Enumerated, if one should want to look at it. We usually don’t.”
“The reasons for hopes?”
“Hope without reason is like flight without wings.”
After a few seconds she realized that I was, in fact, wingless, and was about to awkwardly say something when I waved away her concerns.
“Yes, well…,” I thought, and reached for the right words. “Maybe you don’t need a reason.”
“Then what on earth could one hope for, without reasons? You think you can just jump off a building and fly if you hope that you do? Well, maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. But that’s all dependent on wings and muscle and sperocline intensity.”
“I don’t think that’s what hope does, really,” I said.
She cocked her head in quiet confusion.
(“The people of his country,” she would later say, and others would say it with her, “are so deprived of hope that they know not what it is, and have out of desperation deluded themselves into believing they have it. The smallest of our hopes would, to them, seem massive and glorious. Even something as simple as flight is almost inaccessible to them; when one does not have hope, one must make do with sitting inside great metal tubes that pierce the air and staring out the window.” I often tried to correct them about this, but try was all I could. For there was no fact in this that I could say was wrong.)
“No wonder you think you love her,” she said, “if you believe you hope when you have nothing to hope for! Whatever will you say next… It doesn’t need to be there for you to hope for it; she doesn’t need to be at all for you to love her?”
She shifted back into her seat; I hadn’t realized how close she had gotten. “Don’t take it too hard. This is a beautiful world that you have fallen into. Soon I will take you to the laboratories, where they can evaluate your hopes. They’ve got lovely things there; maybe they’ll show you how the sperocline phase shift works, where hoping shifts into alignment, from sickness to sanity, when you’re hoping just the right amount. You can hear it, you know, if you’re quiet; it’s like the ringing of bells. Or maybe we’ll show you the ways our wings work; or perhaps they’ll take you to the astronomy section!.. Our telescopes trained at the heavens, looking for signs of life after death. This is a pleasant land, understand that! Once you start hoping the right way, the right amount, in the right places, it’ll all fall into place.”
I felt unsteady for a moment, and realized that it was merely the train lurching to a stop; a real reason to feel that, a real reason to feel something.
“Telescopes?,” I wondered.
“Of course,” she laughed. “Do you expect them to use microscopes?”
I looked at her again; rescue on the wings of a dove. Columbia, who was there to help me when hope wasn’t.
Her smile and body both were full of a warm strength, a vibrant and self-sufficient health. Her skin was unbruised by the hard ground and uncut by blades of grass. She could leap without looking, without caring, for something to catch her fall— for she could do that herself, with the wings this wonderful world had given her.
To her belonged a gentle certainty that the world was full of hope, that the world was a thing of beauty, and that no dreams, no ideas, no images, were needed; give no thought to them, for the goodness of the day is sufficient thereof. And who needs dreams when flight is but a step away?
To her belonged warm smiles and green countrysides and vast white wings, and today and tomorrow, and a land full of promises.
But those things did not belong to me, and I did not belong to her, however lovely, however human, however angelic, she might appear.
This was not heaven, I realized, not for the first time. They likely don’t even know what that is. This was a country that feels no need for heaven. If they did, they would not look for it with telescopes.
I learned many things about hope that day, in the laboratory. I learned how to hear it, how to see it, how to tell if it was there. I learned how much of it I had (12%; the doctors said that it was due to living here, that it had not been as high before most likely, and that it might go up as high as 26 if I worked at it). I learned about sperocline effects and the way that hope, under the right atmospheric conditions, turns into lifting force via phase shift. I learned about what generates hope, and how hope can feed back onto that in turn. And I learned that excess hope is a weight, that makes one heavier, and that it binds one to the hard ground, and that to fly one must not carry excess hope; they have equations that prove this. They say that when you stop hoping altogether, when your heart has not a tie to the world, that your feet lift off the ground and you go rocketing up into the sky, your connection to the earth severed.
Upon a field of green I stand, beneath a field of endless blue containing clouds, flying people, and sperocline layers. This is a strange world. This is a wonderful world. This is a world full of hope; and I will float upon that hope like an empty bottle floats on water.
I am reaching for the sky. I feel lighter already. My fingers graze against nothing, and I pull on it, heaving myself up.
Butterflies lurch in my stomach, for real reasons, and I feel light and weightless.
My feet dangle lightly above the ground, shoeless.
I’m flying.
I ascend, suspended in the air like disbelief.
This is a beautiful world, I think. This is a hopeful world. There is so much more hope here than there ever was back home. There’s so much hope that they don’t even have to feel it to know that it’s there; they’ve got it all arrayed on their spreadsheets.
I see the green beneath me now; it stretches out as far as I can see, to the left of me. It is amazing just how green a place can get when untreaded by feet or tires.
To the right are the houses where these hopeful people roost, and beyond that another expanse of green.
This is a strange country, but the rooftops here look the same nonetheless, when surveyed from a great height.
Closer to the clouds I climb; they are not hard like the ground; they will not hurt me. Grey they are, and rain may fall tonight; I will not fall with it; I have another place to go.
And a brief thought crosses my mind, and I see it fall like lightning through my head:
I wanted to do loving things, to her. Instead, so many times, I did calculated things. I know that there is no difference… in fact, she often liked it better when I connived and calculated… but I want to do loving things.
There are no loving things to do.
Do them anyway.
I feel happy, for no reason.
And then I feel sickness and nausea and I know it through the words I scream through vomit for I am falling once more and I think to myself that I ought to be used to this by now and I don’t think ‘I’m going to die’ even though I will because instead I think of how I’m not going home and it’s for the reason of falling, for that reason. Because hope is in my heart and it weighs me down.
And then I feel a lurch, for a real reason, because it’s gone, the weight is gone. And another, because it’s back. And I’m falling and not falling and falling again. Every time I hope, I fall; every time I fall I despair; every time I lose hope, I rise again, and thus I tumble earthwards slow and haphazard, and reach for the sky where I almost think I see her unreadable face, though I have no reason to think that.
I hoped against hope. I fell gracelessly. I waited for angels to break my fall, so that I might not bruise my feet against the hard ground, but nobody came.
I hit the earth and cried. I think I might have broken something, but that wasn’t why. These were not tears of pain or injury, though I writhed from both, but the tears of a child who had, only after losing it, realized how valuable something was. I had been that child before. I had been that child for most of my life.
It is very hard to hope. It takes a lot out of you and it hits hard and fast and sudden, and it hits you often.
It is very hard not to hope. It hits you all the time, and you’re never quite sure when the next blow will come, or if it will come, and if you knew that then maybe you would leave. Maybe. But as it is you just come back to get hit more.
I cried some more. I felt small and cold and I needed more of what had just beaten me to the ground. I shivered, and clawed at the sky like I was reaching for its hand, so I could pull it closer to me so it would hit me again.
I felt something hit the ground beside me, softly. It was Columbia, a soft thing of comfort for someone whose hopes were hard and cold.
“You are sick,” she said, and I knew she was right. “You’ve been hoping too much. There are better ways to spend your time; we can play games and look through the telescopes, perhaps.”
“I thought…”
“If you thought you were cured, know that you were not, and are not, and may never be. It comes and goes. But do not worry. There are people here who will take care of your sickness. Of your delirium. Of the worm in your head and your heart.”
“Of malignant hopes,” I mumbled.
“Of malignant hopes that fester and inflame,” she intoned, and I think I mumbled it back to her as I passed out.
☙ ☙ ☙ ❧ ❧ ❧
There is no difference between a hopeful world and a hopeless one, I know now. I have understood that about myself, at least. These people would not agree; they think it delirium. Good for them. They have their spreadsheets and their sperocline barometers. I have my sickness and my broken bones.
If there is hope, I bring it with me, wherever I go. It’s lodged in my brain, like a tick gorging itself on my thoughts, on my life. But it’s there nonetheless. Tying me to earth.
I’m lying back in a chair, eyes closed. I feel something, and shudder. I feel a presence; not the presence of anything, but presence without substance. Like taste without food, or sound without motion. Like hope decoupled from reality.
In the arms of my rescuer I had been safe from falling, from gravity, from death itself, and a great safety it was; it was safety borne by a pair of great white wings, safety in the arms of a fellow person.
But now I am safe in the hands of something else, utterly safe, totally safe.
I knew, somehow, in the way that one knows things in dreams, in the way that the psychotic know their delusions, that I was safe. Not from anything in particular; fire could burn me, swords could cut me, and my bones could be broken and my flesh rot into dust. But I knew, nevertheless, that I was safe; that these things would not matter; that I might, if I was a little wiser in the ways of this presence, laugh at the very concept of those things endangering me, even as they hurt me.
I was safe from nothing. I was safe from everything. I was still and quiet and knew that, though I could search the world for a thousand lifetimes, I would never find hope, for hope is not such a thing that you can find it.
I am not in that little chair anymore. I am not in that little room anymore. I am not on that little planet anymore. I feel, somehow, that things are different, though I know that nothing has changed; just because she’s not as distant doesn’t mean we’re any closer. Though I am, perhaps, closer to the dream of her.
I feel gravity, and I feel wind, and I feel good. I feel good, and I wonder at it, because I’m not sure if there’s any good to feel.
My feet are firmly planted on the rooftop where I made my ascent to that other world, that winged world, a world full of hope. I do not want to go back. This place, the old earth, that my heavy hopes have connected me to, is enough for me. And I even think that, maybe— I’m not quite sure, but maybe— I may be at home here. Possibly. It’ll have to do.
Home at last, among the silly bipeds who are not feathered things.