You were born of air, so of course you’d be the first of us to take to the friendly skies. You, the grooviest girl with the biggest bells on the bottoms of your long, long jeans. Have fun, I advised, which is what we said before we learned that life decides and you and all your friends are trapped in the elevator to the stars that goes up and up of its own accord no matter how many buttons you push, until it doesn’t and your stomach flips with the down down plunge, when you still pin your hopes on that notion that words are a blessing. Not that there were elevators in our small town, so we had to imagine ourselves as you and the thrill of rising rising rising into the sky like a Bond girl, like Rolling Stones, like any of those golden jetsetters we’d so love to be. I knew you would, have fun that is, because that’s the sort of breezy bird you were, bold and daring and strong enough to grab a cloud and ride it through a storm while the wind tangled your black hair and you laughed at the lightning and tamed thunder.
“I’ll send a postcard from Cuba,” you said. A joke from a time when we’d just begun to suspect that the destination aimed for wasn’t always the destination arrived at, a time when stealing a metal bird actually meant something, led the Cronkite broadcast, kept us breathless. Even after touchdown on the Big Island you still flew high, Menehunes chasing you through the darkness, all of you laughing as smoke wafted from your mouth.
And years soared past, and the air took you into its wild blue academy to make you an officer, a bona fide controller of flight. You were never a sparrow, not a small-boned mouthful for any predator, but a mythic glider, soaring toward the sun, reflecting its flame, where the rest of us would have been lost to the plummet expected of ordinary mammals.
It was only when your feet stuck firmly on the ground somewhere around Phoenix that a hurried trucker’s speed scattered your feathers all along I-10, and now you are forever held down, down, down in the ground where you can’t even look at the sky much less spread your wings and ride the thermals that love you.
