Found You With My Eyes Closed

Flying People

It’s been so long.

Peering cautiously out of one barely opened eye, my mind harkens back to those old dreams of flight. I recall the strange sensation — it was more like floating in zero gravity after springing nimbly into the air, than actually flying. This time was similar. Only instead of rising up exuberantly, then floating tranquilly, this feeling was one of leaping from one thing to another. That’s me, a rehabilitated Tarzan swinging from tapestry to tapestry in some huge library in my head. Momentum was again my friend but now gravity was an unspoken nemesis I had to respect in order to soar through the air the way I loved to.

Again I recognize the importance of staying in the middle. Not so much in the sense of balance or moderation, as is usually the case, but for the crucial sake of survival. This is new. This instinctual restraint is not inborn, but the result of knowing firsthand what happens. If you let the joy of the magic take you too high too fast, the magic consumes you. And now there’s the new knowledge of the opposite extreme. Flying low, slowly and apathetically, is safe. But there’s the gradual descent that inevitably follows. I had taken it too far, this fear of burning up in the sun. For too long I had dutifully meandered the earth like a good human, bent on mediocrity and the general consensus.

But that’s not real, anymore than television is. And it certainly does not satisfy, the way a well-oiled meal enjoyed in the company of good friends would. Most importantly, it’s not life-sustaining. Moving through the air and practicing physics in a dream-state is the cure, and I drink up the experience much like I would down a gulp of water offered up by a mystical cactus in the sweltering heat of the desert.

I breathe. Hope still lives.

One Reply to “Found You With My Eyes Closed”

  1. I haven’t been to your site in (literally) years, and I haven’t read your writing in even longer. I didn’t know that you were still writing. I enjoyed this. =]

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