Thousand Oaks, California
I flew from coast to coast when I was nine years old. My father found work in August and in September, he shepherded our family from Silver Spring, Maryland to Thousand Oaks, California. I still had wings then. And lungs strong enough for the journey.
We arrived in the West on a heavy, unwelcoming wind and I watched the landscape as it became desert. There were new things here. Plants, armed with spikes, grew sturdy from the ground that lined the road to our new home. Palm-sized lizards moved as shadows on the beige pavement, hardly distinguishable from the colors and textures beneath them.
As we traveled, we listened to our favorite albums on repeat, volume high. The bass in the music sent vibrations through my temples, shaking my vision around the edges. It kept my father awake, but I felt myself falling slowly through the air, closer and closer to sleep.
Can anyone out here see me? I can’t seem to see myself
Can anyone out here hear me? I can’t seem to hear myself
The ecosystem that surrounded us was harsher than the one we parted with and I closed my eyes to it, lulled to the ground as the melodies sifted through me.
When we arrived at our new home, a dense apartment building in a suburban neighborhood, it was dark. My father opened his car door and pulled the key from the ignition, cutting off the music.
The resulting silence was as palpable as the weight of the summer air. Until the crickets began to sing.
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The pavement warmed the rubber soles of our sneakers as my sister and I walked home from our first week of school. We were both acclimating to our new environment; I to fourth grade and her to first.
For most of the way, tall oaks and pines cast shadowy relief down our necks, lightening the load of the heat.
When we reached a quiet intersection, I looked up. The reaching branches of trees had receded and in their place, overhanging street lights struck paths through the sky. We had lost our protection from the sun and I thought it might snuff us out as we waited to cross. The shade on the other side of the crosswalk appeared years away.
As we waited, the chirping of birds intermingled with the approaching sound of a guitar – rock-and-roll playing loudly from a car that was driving fast toward the corner on which we stood.
I looked to my left to watch them as they barreled toward the intersection. As they neared the corner, both the front and backseat windows rolled down. From inside the car emerged heads, hair trailing in the wind, arms and hands, pointing fingers, torsos, eyes, mouths and flying spit.
The white paint of the car, glaring in the sun, formed a spotlight around which everything else became dark. The sound of tires screeching around the corner drowned out the sound of the birds and idling engines and then there was silence. Until they began to shout.
Go to hell!
….Africa!
Fuck you!
An urge to fly from the street corner where the warning hand was now blinking rhythmically leaped against my ribcage, but my feet were hammered into the sidewalk, wings cemented down.
The weight of the words which I couldn’t yet understand layered atop the weight of the sun to create a pressure that I had never before felt in my physical body. I wondered how anyone could fly in an environment like this.
I stood still for a while, silent and heavy. Then I remembered the crickets, small creatures who had wings but did not fly, and I opened my mouth to sing.
Paris, France
I arrived in Paris in a wing seat, purchased, born of aluminum and heat. It was September and the air was warm. Paris, where life was so palpable it could be slipped into and worn, was a balm to lungs that were learning to breathe again.
By this time, I was twenty four years old. I had lived in many cities. Los Angeles, Delhi, Cape Town, São Paulo, New York. In each place I sampled the air carefully, searching for an atmosphere that was lighter than the heaviness I still carried in my lungs. Flight paths smudged their way across the banks of my memory, leaving traces visible enough that I remained conscious of being tethered to the earth.
As I learned later in life, crickets have two pairs of wings. Their outer wings are sturdy, armor-like protection for delicate, membranous hind wings which may be used to fly. Many crickets will never peel back their armor and allow themselves flight. Despite their resistance, each one is capable of lift off should they feel called to the sky. For a cricket, flight, as I came to know, is not a problem of where, but of when.
On a November night in Paris when the air was beginning to cool, there was a concert given by a harpist from California. We waited outside the venue, a small boat that rested docked and rocking slightly on the Seine, in groups of twos and threes, shuffling our steps and murmuring in expectation.
The cabin of the boat was lit softly with strokes of purple and blue. The stage lights rotated to produce waves of color that drifted across the room, dancing through the artificial fog emanating from the base of the stage and transforming the sum of our breaths into an indigo tide.
We fluttered from one section of the floor to another, using small movements and small voices, seeking a comfortable spot to land until the artist appeared from behind the weight of a black curtain. She approached the center stage where a harp awaited her, haloed in a mauve glow. The tender pluck of four strings ushered a silence unto the crowd.
She told us she wrote this song about an astronaut. About the feeling of brilliant grandeur that accompanies existing in a realm outside of the earth. About flying above our mountains and valleys and pains and aches into an atmosphere that effortlessly, unquestionably supports your weight, releasing you from the trappings of gravity and stretching your sense of time. About how strange it must feel to return to earth after living an experience that less than 700 people in human history can attest to. About adjusting to life with feet planted firmly on the ground, head bowed underneath the pressure of the sun. About how it feels to lose your wings.
Her fingers and thumbs rubbed against the taut strings of the harp, legs and wings creating friction and friction creating song, hypnotizing every last fledgling that stood breathless, swaying in the cabin of Le Petit Bain.
The sparkling, caressing notes cascaded from the crown of my head toward the soles of my feet, dripping down fingertips until the entirety of the room was alight in their vibration. The lilting path of the melody soared and pirouetted, steering wide swaths of oxygen into my lungs until I was enraptured. Every cell in my body relaxed, ready to alight.
Home is not a place. Not a hearth, not a land, not a people, but a time. Moments when twisted roots break free of adopted soil and freedom breaks free of memory. When armor falls with a gasp of air and wings remember to unfurl.
In the belly of the boat, I sang quietly under my breath until, buoyed by the Seine, I flew.
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