![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vignette: flying
Sep. 13th, 2013 11:05 amAlthough once again I couldn't make Wednesday's workshop, Toni provided this poem as a prompt, and the following is what came to mind.
-----
[Despite the way the beginning sounds, this event occurred not when I was still a child, but when I was 19 and a sophomore in college.]
It was 5 o'clock in the morning, and now it was safe to sleep, the sky not yet blue but not still grey, the half-creatures under my bed and in my closet dissolving to dust in the new morning. I lay with my back to the window, my eyes open, still hungry for daylight, watching the anti-shadow of the window lighten on the wall above my desk. I fell into sleep a few times, as always, always jerking awake at the last minute until all of me could fall at once.
See, there was a rope around my heart, a slipknot, with a long length leading out my back beside my spine between my shoulder blades. Most of the time, it was slack; but I could feel it, portentously heavy, knowing what was coming sooner or later. Sometimes it would catch on something as I walked, or a hand would reach through the back of the chair I was sitting in and yank, and my heart would be jerked back and out of my body completely — I could feel it, almost see it, hovering in the air two feet behind me — and I would have to stop where I was, stop what I was doing, stop thinking, even, and wait for it to fight itself back into my chest, thudding hard as it played catch-up for the beats it had missed. It was important not to move while my heart was missing, because if I wasn't precisely where it had left me, it might not be able to find me.
Whenever I tried to sleep, of course the rope dangled over the edge of that cliff behind me, all the way to the bottom, and the sunlight never reached that far down so the half-beings there never dissolved even when it was dawn where I was, and they pulled the rope like it was attached to a church bell. I had to resist each time until the angle was just right and they pulled the entire belfry of my body down with the bell, until my chest and the rest of me fell with my heart down into darkness. It was still painful, still terrifying in the pitch-black at the bottom of the cliff, but at least I was whole, and I with my heart could slowly work my way up the rock face and back into the world.
I lay that morning as always, resisting the pull, too tired to be afraid except for those moments when my chest was empty. I watched that window anti-shadow as I failed to fall and waited to fall. And then something new happened.
I heard a soft noise behind me, through the open window. It should have been the unremarkable wingbeats and coo of a passing pigeon. Except at the same moment, I saw the grey shadow pass in front of me. I saw the noise, I heard the shadow, and my heart nearly left my body, but I was backwards and the rope pulled at my heart through my sternum, and my sternum did not give and I fell forward and sideways and up and not back, and I was in the space between the feathers and the song, I was within the dove, clothed in down and above the ground.
It was a second. Not even a second. But it echoed, reverberated like my drumming heartbeat. I had fallen forward. I had fallen upward. Forward existed, upward existed. I had been there, all of me, whole. I had flown. I did not yet conceive of a future for myself — didn't dare, couldn't dare, to think more than a week ahead because the weight of even imagining that impending time was one of the things that could crush me — but I dared imagine a single second of a possible future, when perhaps I would maybe fall forward again.
-----
[Despite the way the beginning sounds, this event occurred not when I was still a child, but when I was 19 and a sophomore in college.]
It was 5 o'clock in the morning, and now it was safe to sleep, the sky not yet blue but not still grey, the half-creatures under my bed and in my closet dissolving to dust in the new morning. I lay with my back to the window, my eyes open, still hungry for daylight, watching the anti-shadow of the window lighten on the wall above my desk. I fell into sleep a few times, as always, always jerking awake at the last minute until all of me could fall at once.
See, there was a rope around my heart, a slipknot, with a long length leading out my back beside my spine between my shoulder blades. Most of the time, it was slack; but I could feel it, portentously heavy, knowing what was coming sooner or later. Sometimes it would catch on something as I walked, or a hand would reach through the back of the chair I was sitting in and yank, and my heart would be jerked back and out of my body completely — I could feel it, almost see it, hovering in the air two feet behind me — and I would have to stop where I was, stop what I was doing, stop thinking, even, and wait for it to fight itself back into my chest, thudding hard as it played catch-up for the beats it had missed. It was important not to move while my heart was missing, because if I wasn't precisely where it had left me, it might not be able to find me.
Whenever I tried to sleep, of course the rope dangled over the edge of that cliff behind me, all the way to the bottom, and the sunlight never reached that far down so the half-beings there never dissolved even when it was dawn where I was, and they pulled the rope like it was attached to a church bell. I had to resist each time until the angle was just right and they pulled the entire belfry of my body down with the bell, until my chest and the rest of me fell with my heart down into darkness. It was still painful, still terrifying in the pitch-black at the bottom of the cliff, but at least I was whole, and I with my heart could slowly work my way up the rock face and back into the world.
I lay that morning as always, resisting the pull, too tired to be afraid except for those moments when my chest was empty. I watched that window anti-shadow as I failed to fall and waited to fall. And then something new happened.
I heard a soft noise behind me, through the open window. It should have been the unremarkable wingbeats and coo of a passing pigeon. Except at the same moment, I saw the grey shadow pass in front of me. I saw the noise, I heard the shadow, and my heart nearly left my body, but I was backwards and the rope pulled at my heart through my sternum, and my sternum did not give and I fell forward and sideways and up and not back, and I was in the space between the feathers and the song, I was within the dove, clothed in down and above the ground.
It was a second. Not even a second. But it echoed, reverberated like my drumming heartbeat. I had fallen forward. I had fallen upward. Forward existed, upward existed. I had been there, all of me, whole. I had flown. I did not yet conceive of a future for myself — didn't dare, couldn't dare, to think more than a week ahead because the weight of even imagining that impending time was one of the things that could crush me — but I dared imagine a single second of a possible future, when perhaps I would maybe fall forward again.
