One time, I was on a plane by myself.
I was leaving everything I knew, everyone I loved, everywhere I had been, to try and stake my claim. To get my career, my passion, and my life going.
I looked out the scratchy Plexiglass window. I saw the sea of clouds below me. I saw the horizon, infinite and daring. I looked down at the green and brown earth.
And a wave of vertigo overcame me.
I grabbed the armrests tightly, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to make the world stop spinning...no good. I could feel, concretely feel, every inch of every foot of every mile between me and the ground.
At that moment, aerodynamics didn't mean a damn thing - the only thing keeping me and the rest of my plane from falling 35,000 feet to my death was my sheer willpower. I was freefalling in a blue void, and I couldn't make it stop.
I had never been afraid of flying before.
***
In the new place. Lying in bed. Dreaming of loves and drives in the process of dying. Candles at various places, since it soothes me. Evolution is chaos measured out in observable spans. Everything always changes, reacts, nothing is static.
I'm no different. I have gained and lost and smiled and frowned and all the rest. I'm no different.
My eyes shut.
And I suddenly bolt upright in bed as HE is there, enveloping me, my essence, my body, I can't scream, he has wings, he's filling and growing beyond me, and for one brief second, for one timeless instant, I know what power is...
power is the fire of heaven under your wings...
And nothing is ever the same.
***
Still it continues. Still it goes on.
I'm about to make a bad choice. It will affect me in ways I could never have imagined. It will be a bleak period in my life, bleaker than I first recognize. It will stifle me in ways I won't see until much later.
Something knows I'm making a bad choice.
I'm sleeping. And I'm flying. I'm three stories above the ground. I'm floating above a parking lot outside my apartment building. And I can feel it, I can feel it in my stomach, the sensation that tells me you are the only one who can decide where to fly to.
I wake up.
***
Tied down shackled chained to the ground wrapped in iron and thrown in a river Lilliputian ropes be practical buy the sky and sell the sky two feet swallowed by the ground someone set me free, okay?
I start working.
The evidence of some of that work still exists elsewhere on the Web.
Most of it is inside me.
For I'm seeking ekstasis.
***
Waking up. Sun shines. Blue sky masks cold wind.
A culmination. A confusion. A confirmation.
And a clay mask slides off my face and shatters on the ground.
So then there's me. Just me. No expectations, no worries, nothing that has been forced on me from outside. No chains. Just me. And it's scary, because at least when you're chained down, you have an idea of what you're capable of. Here, there are no boundaries. The sky, literally, is the limit.
And I still have that sick feeling in my stomach. It'll always be there, to remind me of where I was, what I struggled against.
I'm flying. Finally.