Bohemia Village Voice

Learning to Fly

All night I have waited for this moment. Sitting here, on the edge, listening to dogs and gulls and fog-horns far out to sea. Once only another car snaked around the headland, its lamps tracing the curve of the road, the purr of its engine whispering that it sensed I was there. Then it was gone.
I picked up a handful of stones and cast them into the water below, counting one-and . . . two-and . . . three-and . . . four-and . . . five-and . . . six-and . . . seven-and . . . never hearing the sound as they hit the sea.
There is a point at which all the roads of your life converge. Every turning, every decision to go one way or another, leads to this. All the days, weeks and years of my life have brought me to this point, to this place. This is where I become who I am meant to be. Never have I been so sure. The journey is over. There is no road left, no other path but this.
At this point, when the ink-black sky dissolves into thin grey and the air, which I thought couldn’t get any colder, drops another notch or two on the mercury, I close my eyes, stretch my arms heavenwards and flex my muscles to the tips of my fingers. I roll my head from side to side to relieve my aching shoulders but it doesn’t help.
The ache between my shoulder blades has become an insistent, stabbing pain. Tentatively, I feel behind me with one hand and find that a bony ridge has sliced through the fabric of my top. The same on the other side, but this ridge is longer and has a covering of soft down. I open my eyes and stare in wonder at my hands. No longer are they the stumpy and fleshy hands I have hated for years, but smooth and elegant with a faint web of skin just visible between each finger and tiny tufts of white feather emerging from each joint.
Quickly I unlace my shoes and place them neatly in the fading beam of my car’s headlights. I remove my stockings and fold them one inside each shoe. I haul myself upright, stiff after sitting so long on the cold ground. Barefoot on the damp grass, the dew seeping between my toes, I feel so connected, so alive.
I feel the heartbeat of the earth through the soles of my feet. I want to dance, stamping my feet to its rhythm. I flex my toes and stretch the arches, now standing on tip-toe, now flat on the ground. I feel the energy flow up, flooding my body. I feel powerful. More powerful than I have ever been. I am standing at the gateway of life and death, of heaven and earth, of darkness and light.
And suddenly there it is. A flood of light as the sun’s disc finally erupts on the horizon, banishing darkness, erasing the night. I open my arms, hands palm upwards, to embrace the light. I close my eyes against its brightness and instantly, the light is inside me, burning through every fibre of my body, searching out my darkest corners, purifying thought and fear, bringing forth bone and feather and wing. That rushing sound must be my wings unfurling for the first time, that shudder the first tentative beat against the cold, thin air. And that fluttering in my stomach, excitement as they lift me from the ground.
Now, at last, I am free. Now I know what I am. I am light. I am LIGHT. I am nothing but Light.