So I fell.
Long did I linger in the crater of that great collapse. I made shelter amidst the scorched earth in a place where nothing grew but age. A broken spirit that languished in a past it could not move passed. All I wanted was to forget, all I did was remember; this body was nothing but nerves and memory. So when I was finally given a method of escape, and found that sweet release from this condition called ‘self’, I leapt. My mind inevitably caught up to what my skin already knew. There was a snap, followed by the breaking of many branches. A hatchling abandoned in its nest, doing only what instinct instructed but unarmed in the knowing; it teeters towards the edge and falls, for no one taught it how to use its wings. For the glimpse of a moment, under a sky so blue, there is liberation. The blissful naivete of innocence that so easily mistakes falling for flying. The ground rose to meet me, and I kissed the expectant lips of the earth that should have remained unknown and a stranger to me, as my bones shattered from the consequences of my mistakes.
So I fell. Many years were taken, and I took my time in return because time felt owed to me. I don’t remember most of it, certainly not the failure of my wings, or the wind that still called to me. More years lost, but they were now mine to lose. The sheer brokenness of myself, the parts of me in such obvious need of repairs, sought medicine in quite poisonous things. I came to lick my wounds so compulsively, the very act of healing kept injuries from ever closing. Perhaps I held onto that pain as the last link to those who authored it. This was all they gave me, but it was nonetheless given to me. For what value does a child learn from neglect? What possible worth can be fostered from one so abused and so easily abandoned? Unloved, valueless, a thing to be discarded. Someone else’s lies became my truths, and I wore them all, and called myself an honest man.
Guilt had nearly killed what remained of me that still dared to desire or dreamt of flight. My shame, my perpetual narrator, deemed me unworthy of any love. My great want wore the face of my greatest fear, and lifetimes of heartache had made of me a coward. What living thing is afraid of such goodness? Was I dead? A ghost passing straight through the things I still yearned to touch? People slipped between my fingers like water, and dripped out of my life into polluted rivers of memory, inevitably lost to a heartless sea. These hands were never taught to hold, there was only the act of letting go. There is safety to be found in the distance between things not yet named, but I could not forget the thing I should not even have remembered. It haunts me here, in the solace of my quiet solitude. More than the promise of the sky, I feared the pain of the fall. I hid myself away, and bound my wings because of gravity’s cruelty. But I was meant to fly. The wind had never forgotten my name. It calls to me still, and I dare to fall.
I was meant to fly.