Night Flying

I’ve decided I’m going to learn to fly.

But I don’t particularly want to do it alone.

So next full luna, I will sit at my midnight window and stare at Mr Moon’s lustrous smile while I wait for my teacher, no doubt feeling tethered interminably to the earth.

What are our chances tonight, you think? I will ask of my pearlescent companion.

He’ll tip his top hat at me silently with a silver wink.

I’ll press my fingers flush against my lips and watch my scarlet kiss fly from my hand through the inky sky to land on his shimmering cheek.

He knows who I’ll be waiting for in the night. He knows who I’ll be sitting by my window and searching the sky for, who I’m thinking of while I hum a little Roberta Flack.

The first time, ever I saw your face.

How would it happen? What would that be like?

I wonder…

Well, I’d need a suitable balcony, of course.

Mine would extend from the tiny window of a loft or attic, that secret room at the top of the house, closest to the sky. It would be an attic, I think. Of the enchanted kind filled with chests of old letters, paper dolls, black and white photographs. It would have white-washed windows that you push outwards onto a wrought iron balcony, bent and moulded into scrolls of vines and lace. There would be pots of clustered moonflowers in the corner that in the midnight hour would show their creamy centres to the glimmering light in the night sky. In slippers of ivory, I would climb out onto my balcony, bells and stars woven in knots through my hair, and stand amidst ink and platinum with my nightdress falling in muted comets and clouds to my ankles.

And there, I’d wait.

I would wait for my passage to the land where time doesn’t exist. Where every day is the honeyed kind that you’ve lived and thought to yourself, please don’t end. The kind of day that your fingertips tingle and itch at the memory of, as though you want to reach into the oblivion of your mind and grab it with both your hands, or you wish you could bottle and preserve in a jam jar so you could open it whenever you wanted, to embalm yourself in the spiced bronze kisses of beautiful moments passed.

I would wait.

And then… there would be the shimmer of a summer breeze that would ruffle my nightdress of comets and clouds, and softly graze my naked skin.

I would chew my lip with a smile, as he falls like a silver feather through the inky sky to the lace and vines of my balcony.

The first sight of him feels like so many first things in fusion.

The first time I discovered the fig tree in bloom in my back yard and lay on the grass in dappled sun, the bowl of my skirt full with ripe fruit.

The first time I put my ear to the shell that was my father’s phonograph and listened to Coltrane as a girl.

The first time I received a hand-written love letter and ran my fingers over the words, wishing the ink would seep into my skin.

The first time I realised my hunger for the magic that lies between the covers of books.

With an arch of his brow and an outstretched hand, he’d beckon from just there beyond my balcony and I’d balance on the edge in my ivory slippers, a tightrope queen, and reach for his hand.

As the well of his slow lazy dimples deepen, I’d put my palm to his.

“Wendy.”

“Peter.”

And then I’d jump.

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copyright © 2008, Holly Ringland.

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Tags:

aqua, bells, bliss, blue, brush, clouds, dusk, dust, flying, hair, holly, ink, magic, memory, night, peter, platinum, ringland, silver, sky, stars, teal, twilight, wendy and wish