Learning to Fly

The fog has lifted this morning. After two nights of restless sleep with intense dreams, last night passed heavily with little memory. Unlike days where I can see the fog, the past two concealed themselves behind an invisible veil, washing out the colors of the world, distancing them, detaching them from my eyes in a way that made me anxious and annoyed without quite knowing why.

The morning light rends the fabric, piercing deep into my eyes. The day is flinty and bright as the honed edge of a Damascus steel blade. Its sharpness brings clarity, freedom to think, to explore, to chronicle my journey more legibly than the hastily rendered map sketched the days before. A day I wish would go on forever, a day I feel light and able to fly.

Doubts nibble at my wings, feasting on this newfound energy, weighing me down. Bursts of light drive them away only to see them creep forward again as it fades. These small creatures will eventually recloud my mind as either the weather or my mood turns.

But not today.

Today, they remain on the periphery, hiding. Today, I can focus to the horizon. Even the smallest details draw my attention, making me wonder how I could have overlooked them before. The color, scent and texture of scenes are rendered with the smallest and lightest strokes. Pieces of the puzzle find their mates at a glance instead of through painstaking repetition. The voices of characters babble in my head like a stream tumbling down a mountain after rain. Threads of ideas untangle, slipping from one another as smoothly as spun silk instead clinging in their normal scratchy wool.

I want to share days like today even though the shadows whisper that what I write will likely become garbled when filtered through the fog of someone else's morning. But that doesn't matter. I never know what scrawled line might bring color to someone else's world like a rainbow after tears.

Thoughts resonate within my mind, filling it against the days when it feels hollow and empty. Days when it echoes like a canyon, when one phrase or line might reflect back from a day like today. Those words are the voice that guides me through the fog. They call me to the edge and one step beyond to savor the wind until the ground jolts me awake to ponder another pale dawn outside my bedroom window wondering if it foreshadows another day in the sky.

Days like today the fall is worth the pain of impact knowing that one day I might learn to fly.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III