Tennessee

I’ve always wanted to go flying. To be in the sky where everyone can see you and you can see all. Where you’re so high off the ground and you’re afraid to fall, butterflies fluttering all around and within you, and you breathe so deep the air strips your throat clean.

Up there the sky is the ocean waiting to be explored, white cotton clouds, and birds gliding slow. It’s like a whole other world almost empty, where you can scream at the top of your lungs and still nobody will hear you. Up there nobody can catch you, nobody can hurt you; up there is a freedom like no other.

I remember the time when he took me up there once, up to his kingdom. I skimmed my hands through the white; the wet was cold but it only made me feel more alive. The orange glow from the setting sun cast shadows over the golden fields and he laughed at my fear as we tumbled and curved and dived towards the darkened ground like barrels falling fast. But the smile on his face told me how much he loved it. His smile made me smile.

But now I lie in the fields, watching the empty amber sky. He isn’t here anymore. He’s gone to another place where the skies are full of noise that drones and metal, where sharp explosions of black and orange rip through the sky and bullets shoot like fire piercing holes through anything they hit. Where he is, the sky is a battlefield, where anybody can catch you, anybody can hurt you. Where he flies, there is only freedom in surviving.

I wait for the day he returns, the day I can hold him safe in my arms and kiss him softly. I wait for the day he claims back the crown from the clouds that drift here, the day he takes me up with him again, back to his kingdom, where we can forever fly free.