How To Fly

How To Fly | Chapter One

                Ever since I was a little girl I wondered what it would be like to fly. If you could feel the cool, blue of the sky envelope your skin, if the soft breeze blew against your cheeks and carried you to unknown places, if the heat from the sun warmed your skin and covered it in yellow sunshine. I thought that if I could learn to fly I would fly away from home. Fly far, far away from home and spend eternity in the vast sky where no one could hurt me.

                But those were just dreams, and like most childhood fantasies they never came true. I never learned to fly, and I never made it far, far away from here.

                And years later with childish dreams and fantasies erased from my mind I still wondered what it would be like to fly. And more importantly, I wondered what life would be like now if I ever did learn to fly. Would it be simple as one, two, three and all of a sudden I’m soaring through the air? Or would it be one of those things that took lots of hard work and time? Would I have to practice every day and only make slight progress as the weeks and months rolled on until finally, I could jump up into the never ending blue and never come down?

                Now I was finally flying, but it wasn’t at all how I imagined it would be. I couldn’t feel the wind on my skin. I couldn’t feel the sunlight coursing through my veins and look on endlessly into the sky. In fact all I could see of my flying fantasies was the small view out the white, oval window.

                I heard mumbling and felt something warm lean on my shoulder. I turned to see Ms. Caleb resting her sleeping head on me and signed inwardly as to not wake her up. I had nothing against Ms. Caleb; she has been nice enough to me ever since the incident, as she liked to call it. She was polite enough, took me in for a few days when I had nowhere else to stay and smiled when I looked like I needed to see one. But there was something about her that bothered me.

Maybe it was the look she gave me. I thought she was different, I thought she understood, but no. She gave me the Look. The one that all the others gave me when they knew, thinking that there sympathy and false love would fix everything. Make all my problems go away.

But I guess that’s what you had to expect from people like Ms. Caleb. As a social worker she must see this all the time, the broken home, the broken children, the broken hearts and minds. She never knew different then to be nice enough as to not get attached and to smile and nod when necessary. And give you the Look of course. They all give you the Look.

I sat in uncomfortable silence as the airplane sped through the sky at speeds of five or six hundred miles per hour. Speeds that seemed unreal because if I ever learned to fly I could never go that fast.

I never imagined my first time flying like this.

I stared back out the window and willed sleep to come, but the God of Slumber refused to answer my prayers. Instead of drifting off into dreamland like I hoped I would I leaned my head on the cool airplane glass and imagined myself floating in the clouds.

“Hey darling, do you want something to drink?”

It couldn’t be. No, of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t Her speaking; it wasn’t Her calling me ‘darling’ in that mocking tone like she always did. It wasn’t Her talking to me from hundreds and hundreds of miles away while we went at unreal speeds through the never ending skies.

I slowly turned towards the speaker, praying with everything inside me it wasn’t who I thought it was. I dug my fingernails into my palms until I felt the familiar warm, stickiness of blood. It was a horrible habit, and unfortunately left me with hundreds of little half moon scars on the inside of my hands. But it was an old, familiar ritual that for some odd reason placed an ounce of comfort in me. Blood, I was used to blood. It was familiar to me; it flowed through my veins every second, every day. It was simple, normal, a part of life, and a part of me. I tried to explain this to Ms. Caleb many times but she never understood, she just gave me an odd look and left my weird habits alone.