There was a time when I didn’t know how to touch the sky. I used to go for walks on the sidewalks around the neighborhood for hours at a time, and occasionally I’d run really fast, arms out by my sides, and try to get just the right angle for liftoff. (The Wright Brothers solved this one a century ago, right?) I just wasn't fast enough; I didn’t have enough speed. I didn’t have the lift or propulsion or light wooden wings.
In my dreams, I didn’t need maximum speed to achieve liftoff. I didn’t need the right arm angle. I just lifted my arms, and the bottom half of my body got really light and I floated up from the yard, above the house, and tilted forward to move straight ahead. If I tilted just right, I could swoop up into the clouds.
I sometimes think it all started with my love of comics and superheroes. My childhood was saturated with stories about superpowered men and women who could hover above the ground and shoot off into the sky at will. Superman. Stratos. Silverhawks. Silver Surfer. Storm. Silly, stupid things I eventually internalized and accepted as a part of myself.
The reality of how I learned to fly, though, is something a lot less heroic. It started with a yellow butterfly. When I was in middle school, I used to bus across town to Hines Middle School in Newport News, Virginia. I hated middle school with a passion, and I didn’t realize what depression was back then. Neither did my parents. (It couldn’t have been clinical, because that didn’t really exist then. It was just a down time. Crying for no reason. Dread of being around people, but also dread of being alone. My mind trying to catch up to the changes my body was going through.)
One day when I was sitting in a school bus riding toward home, I saw a yellow butterfly fluttering outside the bus window. It just kind of hovered in place, lightly flitting up and down. When the bus stopped at a red light a few miles down the road, I looked outside the window and saw the butterfly again. This continued all the way home, to my house on Little John Lane in the fancifully named Nottingham Village. I know it seems ridiculous now, but I swore back then that it was the same butterfly following me all the way home. And when I felt tears welling up after school the next day, I saw the same butterfly again. And it followed me home again. And all I had to do was focus on that singular image—the light bounce, the flit and flutter of delicate wings—and I could keep the irrational fears and paralysis in check.
When I turned 11 ½ years old, I was on top of a big dirt mound a couple blocks from my house, playing with the G.I. Joe figures my dad said I was too old for. Zartan and his Dreadnoks were causing all kinds of mayhem, and Snake Eyes swooped away from them in a jetpack. All of a sudden, I realized that I didn’t have to stay on the ground if I didn't want to. I stood on top of the dirt mound, and I looked down and lifted up, and the ground was a few feet below my shoes. What’s weird about the first time you fly is that it’s not terrifying or exhilarating or any of the other clichéd reactions you’d expect. It just kind of is. I floated effortlessly, and then I drifted backward just as effortlessly, and then—after quickly glancing around to make sure nobody was watching—I drifted up a bit higher.
What most people don’t realize about flying is that it’s a choice. You pinpoint your weight and mass, you detach them from your body inside your mind, and you move without regard to physics. There’s this book called The Science of Superheroes, in which the author tries to explain how physics can explain or refute all the stuff we see in the movies. But it’s mostly bullshit. Real flight is an economy of weight displacement, but it’s mainly a decision you make not to be on the ground anymore.
I made that decision for three years, and I made sure nobody knew about it. It wasn’t hard keeping the secret. If I’d learned one thing from my childhood stories, it’s how important it is to keep secrets from adults and friends who could use them against you. Any kid knows this.
Keeping the secret to myself was actually my favorite part. It was mine. I could go where I wanted and land on the Lions Gate Bridge, and glide above the crab canals, and see the settlers’ ships at Jamestown from all-new angles. I could graze my hands along the topmost pine needles in the trees in the woods. It was exhilarating, because the commonplace things of the world were completely new to me again.
Keeping people from seeing you drift among the trees is pretty tough, but it’s not that hard if you pay attention to what’s happening around you. You fade in and out of environmental movement—white motion, instead of white noise. You float and you fly and you feel like you never have to come down. There was never a fear of being hit by planes because the air gets cold and hard to breathe that high up, so you stay where it’s comfortable. I wasn’t Superman, for Christ’s sake. I was just some random kid.
And then, a couple years later, I forgot how to do it. It wasn’t anything dramatic. Looking back, I feel like there should have been a moment of collapse. A giant epiphany, or some sort of Icarus-like fall. In retrospect, I feel a little cheated. I deserved a metaphor, but there wasn’t one. And there still isn’t. This is the real world, and epiphanies are pretty hard to come by here. It’s always hard to realize when you’re in the middle of a major life moment.
I remember I had a pretty good day early in October. Eric Schultz said he was going to have some friends over, and his parties were always good for hearing weird new music and meeting people from other schools. I looked out the window of the bus and saw other buses pulling away. I saw the stoplights out the windows on the way home. I saw the Lotz Realty Co. office with the Pentecostal sign out front announcing how many days were left until the rapture. ("Get right! Get saved!") And when I got home, I went to the clearing in the woods behind my house, as I had done as often as I could for three years, and I tried to drift away. But I couldn’t. I tried off-and-on for the next few months, but it was gone. I couldn’t budge. Stuck on the ground. On the roof. On the bridge.
I wonder about this stuff from time to time. I wonder if I imagined it all—if I didn’t really see or feel these things. Sometimes it feels like a phantom limb from a phantom self from a phantom time. It’s so far away now. Occasionally I can still see from that perspective, but it’s getting hazier and more unfocused. Further away.
The other day, my son asked me if I’ve seen the yellow butterfly that’s been floating around the neighborhood lately. I haven’t. I haven’t seen it for 30 years. But maybe it’s time to start looking up into the sky again. You never know what you’ll see up there.
Comments