fly zone

I fly through the air. I fly, not like a brave, graceful Eagle—not with the ease that comes from the knowledge that you are on the top of the food chain. I fly like a baby bird uncertain of her wings ability to keep her up. A baby bird that longs for nothing else but to remain in her nest having anything necessary from the world brought to her—the safety of not having to see the superfluous aspects of existence.
I am like the baby bird who has been pushed out on a perch and told to go for it.
But, I don’t want to. I can’t do it. I want to be back in my nest. I want to be anywhere but here. I can’t be this person for you. I can’t be this person for myself. I can’t. I can’t! I can’t!!

Here I am flying. Soaring. Questioning. Doubting. Struggling. Fighting. Conquering.

My demons? I cannot make them out. They are so far beneath me when I am up this high. I can’t even make out that they have faces. I can only see their silhouettes. They are rendered expressionless to me.
It is like when you are racing in a canoe away from the shore. You get to a certain point when you can see people and they are flailing their arms around, but you can’t tell if they are cheering or jeering and it doesn’t matter. Regardless, they are too far away to influence your feelings on the situation. They could be raising the dead or commencing a wild rumpus. This is of no consequence to you.

My demons cannot reach me. I am untouchable in this space and time.

I am far away from even myself. I have never had this feeling before. It must be what dying feels like. I am not hovering over myself, watching myself say inappropriate things to the people I care about. Instead, I feel myself go through cell division. There is me over there and me over here and I can’t tell which me is in the foreground and which me is in the background. Which me is judging me and which me is receiving criticism. However, the animosity comes as soon as division takes places and the divide increases exponentially until I am so far away from myself that I am unsure whether I really exist. I swipe the air, but I can’t touch me. I feel as though something clings to my hands, like reaching into a spider web. Those are the traces of me I have left behind, but I can’t actually feel the substance of me. This is an amalgam of relief and anxiety both of which I can neither feel nor register while I am in the air.

My flight is my death and my birth. As I dive into the grave, I simultaneously feel my head emerge from the womb. I am coming as I am going. This is why I think things fell apart for us. I am an un-anchored tangent and you are a tetherball. You bounce and fly through the air, but you are centered. On my best days I am inconsistent. This led to mirrored resentment. We hated each other for everything we were not. We hated ourselves for everything we were.

In the air, I have no recollection of you or us. If I passed you flying, I might look at you with a strained recognition. Where do I know you from? I might think that I saw you on the train, but it wouldn’t occur to me that we shared intimate moments. That at one time we pressed our heads together in the dark and dreamed each other’s dreams.

Up here there is no trace of anything. There is no mourning. There is no regret. There is only newness and excitement. There is clarity and a faint whistling of air that sails past my ears, like the light tickle of a feather.

My flight is my bliss.