Days and days slip by. Most of them are good days, and some of them are blah days, and sometimes these days are a little bit bad. But most of all -- what I notice about these days more than anything else -- they go so quickly. They rush past me like the el trains that speed by stations without stopping, that roar by me, drowning out the sounds of the other waiting passengers and the guy playing his guitar and singing. I stand there on the platform, and each train creates a huge gust of wind that threatens my balance, that makes me plant my feet more firmly on the ground to keep from being blown over.
Have you ever stood there, watching the train come toward you, looking at the track below you, and wondered what kept you from involuntarily jumping off of the platform, not so much throwing yourself as having your self pulled out over the tracks by the force of the train on the tracks and the wind in the air? Do you ever wonder, as you lean out over the chasm to see whether another train is coming, what would happen if you slipped? (Do you ever wonder what keeps you from disaster?) Do you ever wonder what would happen to the world if you fell or jumped onto the tracks? How it would be turned upside down in just one second? (What the man standing next to you and the woman standing behind you would see? Would feel?) Do you ever wonder just how terrible it would feel to land on the tracks, and whether time would stand still while you rose and fell in the air and then landed on the solid ground and then tried to catch the breath that had been knocked out of you while you waited (it takes no time - not enough time to stand up - and yet it takes endless time - enough time for you to notice the cat hairs on your sleeve and the expressions on the faces of the other people waiting and the shadows cast by the people and the train as it bears down upon you, and maybe even enough time for every thought you’ve ever had to repeat and replay itself in your mind) for the impact of the train with your body? Do you ever wonder if maybe, somehow, there would be no impact, but that instead after you fell or you jumped you would soar? You would fly up above the top of the train, weightless and free and powerful and alive. You would land gently on the top of the train, or maybe float a few inches above it, and you would ride into some other dimension, and the wind would blow your hair straight back, and you would be equal to its force. It would not blow you into danger. You would be invincible.
The summer after my junior year in high school, I went to a summer program called Governor’s Scholars. One day during those five weeks, a group of us - my Literature class - went to Natural Bridge State Park, and we stood on the bridge and looked out over the green expanse of treetops in front of us and behind us and below us (but not above us, not to the left of us, and not to the right of us), and the green treetops looked like a soft carpet. I remember standing there, looking out over the green, and feeling certain that those treetops would be soft, and that falling toward them would be gentle, and that if I jumped, I might fly like the birds that were soaring around me. Who knows? I had never tried to jump out over acres of trees in a magical place like the one we were in. Maybe I would fly. And if I didn’t – couldn’t - fly, then surely my body would waft gently down towards the soft treetops. My only real concern then would be how to get back up to the top so that I could join my class. There was no guardrail. I began to think that if I got too close to the edge, then I would not be able to stop myself from jumping. If I got too close to the edge, the green trees below would pull me out, up, over, and then down.
In the back of my mind, of course, I knew that I wouldn’t fly. I knew that I wouldn’t waft. And so even though I felt drawn to the edge of the rocks and the view below and the soft green treetops, I made myself stay a few feet back. I reminded myself that beneath the gentle green leaves were hard branches and trunks, and that beneath those branches and trunks were sharp rocks and hard ground. I knew that if I moved close to the edge and then jumped or just simply stepped off of the rocky edge, that everyone watching would see a suicide attempt or a terrible accident. No one would understand what had happened to me.
No one would guess that I had only been trying to fly.
I have never dreamed of flying, not really. My dad has told me before that he has been able to make himself fly in dreams, that while still dreaming he recognizes that he is, in fact, dreaming, and that when he realizes that, he realizes that he is not bound by the rules of our physical world, and so he flies and swoops and circles and soars. That’s never really happened to me, although one time I did come close.
I dreamt I was rollerblading around the neighborhood, whatever neighborhood it was, moving faster and faster, with long gliding strides. I surprised myself by how comfortable and capable I was on my rollerblades. I’d put a foot down and glide along for several feet, and then I’d smoothly put down the other foot and glide along several more. Before I realized what was happening, really, I was gliding farther and farther with each step, as if the ground was moving in the same direction I was, as if I was on a people mover conveyor belt at the airport, and then I looked down and saw that I wasn’t gliding on the ground anymore. I was gliding in the air. I’d push off from the ground and move through the air a few inches off the ground, and it was all so real, and I was so impressed with myself, with how well I was rollerblading. I pushed off and up and rode above the ground, and with each new push I was moving higher, leaving the ground farther behind. The temperature was perfect and cool, and the sky was at twilight. I could not have been more graceful or more weightless or more free.
And then I realized, right in the middle of a soaring glide that took me ten or twenty feet off of the ground, that this was not real, that I was only dreaming, and that when I woke up I would not be able to rollerblade like this, and that the town beneath me was not a town I recognized, but was some place from a book I’d read or a movie I’d seen.
I had a moment of disappointment, a sudden interruption of bliss.
But I was still in the dream, and I was still gliding, and I pushed off harder and harder, and I soared higher and higher, and I flew over bushes and people and houses and skyscrapers, and I passed next to birds, and I felt the cool breeze on my skin, and I was moving moving moving moving moving. I always came back down to the ground, but the ground did not restrain me or imprison me; it was nothing to escape from. It did not keep me from soaring. It offered me a place to regain my balance and my bearings. It offered me a still moment to look around and see the landscape. It offered me a chance to launch myself into the air again. To soar again, higher than the time before, weightless and free.
God, that was a good dream.
My brother came to town last night with three of his friends. They had tickets to attend a taping of the Jenny Jones Show this afternoon, and they left Kokomo, Indiana last night after work, driving through a thunderstorm that, here in Chicago, drowned out the sound of the CD playing in our bedroom. They got to our apartment sometime around ten o'clock last night. They trooped in, tall and gangly and young and smiling.
I almost forgot to hug Josh, I was so momentarily startled by the sight of all these strange boys walking into our living room, but Josh stepped to the side and opened his arms and waited for me, and I walked to him and stood on tiptoes and hugged him. He is tall and thin and handsome, and his hair was back in a ponytail, and he smiled easily, almost lazily, at me. I stepped back through the doorway and into the living room, and he followed me, and they were all there, two of them introducing themselves as they came in - Justin and Tim - and the other (who turned out to be Chad) telling me that he had met me before, but that it had been a long time ago, many years before. He had wild curly blonde hair and one arm completely covered, shoulder to wrist, with a colorful tattoo that I found myself staring at while they were there. It was blue and purple and green and red and red and red, and each time I glanced at him, I noticed the red most of all, and I would be reminded of blood and wounds and the fact that someone had spent a long time sticking needles into his arm to make that colorful design.
The four of them, they are from another world that I don't really know. They party a lot, and they don't worry much - at least not about the same things that I worry about - and they don't have much formal education, but they are mostly quick-witted. They go out in groups of friends, four or five or six or more of them at any given time. They take a day off from work to drive up to Chicago, and then when they get there they go out to a bar and a club until morning, when they come back and crash on a sister's or a friend's sister's couch.
I realized while they were there that although the gestures I made toward them were the same ones that I would make to any visitor (introduction of pets and boyfriend, and do you want to sit down? water? put down your things? something to eat? tour of the apartment?), my own feeling about it was different than with other visitors. I felt like I was a whole different generation from them - part of the stodgy generation who have spare rooms and extra sheets and pillows and blankets and dogs, who go to bed at 10:30 or 11:00 on weeknights, and who go to office jobs in the morning. Normally I don't mind being part of that generation, but last night it made me feel old. (I am only three years older than my brother.)
They were all friendly, though, and thanked me politely for every little thing - a drink of water, letting them use the bathroom, giving them a place to hang their shirts in the walk-in closet, promising to leave blankets and pillows on the guest bed for them to divvy up however they saw fit after they got back from their night on the town. Each one thanked me individually for letting them crash with us, and they were gentle with and friendly to Molly, and they smiled at me and Geoff while they stood around waiting for something to happen.
Eventually we worked out that they would head to Wrigleyville and hit the bars or clubs that looked most promising. "I guess you're not coming out to party with us, then?" Josh said, smiling at me. "No, I guess not," I said, smiling back. "I'm already getting sleepy."
My love for Josh is a strange wild thing. I have, in my lifetime, gone months without calling him or writing him. I sometimes go days without thinking about him very much, and yet I think of him now and I am overwhelmed by the fierceness of my love for him. I am never sure that I know him, and am often unsure of his feelings for me. I am not sure what he thinks of me. I think that he has boxed me up as somebody who does not take risks very often. As somebody who is calm and stable and conciliatory. As somebody who maybe smiles too much, who is maybe too eager to please. He wears his surprise on his face like a mask when I tell him things about me that don't fit in the box. "You have rollerblades?" "You went skiing?" "You're taking the el instead of driving?"
I like to surprise him. My brother, he goes bungy-jumping and sky diving and surfing and mountain climbing and motorcycle riding, and I know that he has done things more dangerous than those things, things that he has done in fulfillment of his promise to himself (and spoken out loud to me), that he would "try every drug once." And even though I cringe inside sometimes about his choices, and I wish (pray) for his safety and his happiness, and even though I sometimes think he is doing things all wrong, I want my little brother to be proud of me, because my sad little brother, who is never sure his family loves him, he is amazing to me, and because - except in the way he thinks about my parents and I - he lives outside of the box. (I may think outside the box sometimes, but I mostly live inside it.)
He took a class in glass blowing last fall, and we all got pieces of glass for Christmas. I had already gotten a piece as a housewarming gift when he came up to Chicago for our party in October. The first piece is hard to describe; it looks like it might be a votive candleholder, but it is too small to hold a votive. It's too big for a taper candle. I put pennies in it sometimes. Right now it sits on the coffee table, empty, a decoration that I sometimes pick up and hold in my hand, imagining how it feels to form liquid glass into a shape that you've chosen. The pieces he gave me for Christmas are more traditional in function - an oil lamp and a vase. The vase is my favorite, chunky and square at the bottom but round at the top, clear thick glass with whitish-bluish flecks in places. It is simple and beautiful. It is a vase, I think, for wildflowers.
This morning Josh wanted to know about the oil lamp. "Where is it?" I told him that it was up on top of the tall bookcase against the living room wall. I didn't want him to think I'd tried to hide it away. "The flame on it is really high!" I told him. "I put it up there one time because I was afraid one of the cats would knock it over if it stayed down low." And then the dog walked into the room with her rope toy, asking to play, or maybe Chad got up and walked past us toward the bathroom with a friendly, "good morning," and we talked about something else.
"Where's the oil lamp again?" he said, a few minutes later. I walked toward it, and I got it down for him. He held it for a few seconds, and looked at it. I don't know what he was thinking. I hardly ever do.
He never says he loves me first. Sometimes, though, at the end of a phone conversation, when all other signs point to hanging up, I sense that he is waiting for something to happen, and I say, into the momentary silence, "I love you, Josh." And then he breathes, and he says, "Love you, too," except that the first two words often get lost in a rushed mumble, and all I hear is "too." But I know what he means.
And today, as I am writing this, and thinking about falling and flying and soaring and waiting for something to happen, it occurs to me that maybe in the core of ourselves, Josh and I are not as different as we seem to be, and that maybe this is why my brother skydives and bungy jumps and surfs, and drives too fast and too recklessly, and dares addictions to tame him. And maybe those things that look to us (to me) like unacceptable risks - what look to us (to me) like danger and stupidity - have a different motivation.
Maybe he has decided that he can't just sit back and wait for something to happen.
Maybe he is only trying to fly.
