The Transience of Being the Sky

It took ten seconds to be in the sky.

Nine seconds to notice that I was flying. 

And eight seconds to realize that I was not.

The birds that flew past me tipped their heads to the side. Red, nebular eyes blinked at the illogicality of my being, wondering why I was in the air, and yet couldn’t soar. But birds carried on like a dash of breeze. They left me for the stratosphere. They couldn’t do anything for my wings that only had ten fingers.

But in the quadrillionth of a second, I was neither flying nor falling. There were moondust and helium in the hands of air beneath my back–suspending gravity for half of a moment. To let me be. Those that were staring from below could never discern me from the sky. While I had the eyes of the clouds looming over the world. I witnessed the earth in jigsaws. Green.Sepia. Azure. Everything was just a puzzle of mismatched pieces. 

But for a yoctosecond, I was God.

For a yoctosecond, the sky and I were one.

It took seven seconds to remember who I was:

Playgrounds. Extra fingers. Dragonflies. Rocketships. Astronomical suicides. My spacesuit crinkled against the whooshing turbulence. I pulled my helmet away and let it fall from the sky. The tsunami of oxygen burned through my passageways and blasted into my lungs. I had been breathing in those rusted tanks for so long. 

I was born in the fibrous comfort of grass. In the time when the sun was still radiating, a sphere of scorching poppies. And the sky, much bluer. I was named after a lonely inventor who died in debt and misery. My fingers were still eleven then. Before it broke free from endless paper cuts. I loved murdering dragonflies. I loved the crisp of their wings in between my thumbs. I grew up not taking my eyes off the sky.

 But one day, as I navigated the altocumulus clouds for midday stars, an egret flashed against the sunlight. I squinted my eyes. But as I looked harder, the bird was not flying anymore. I ran, following the egret descend in lazy spirals, until it fell lifeless and cold, to my waiting arms. I didn’t know what that moment entailed or how it flickered change to the grand schemes of things. But that day, I was still basking in ignorance. I just buried it on the foot of a diospyros tree, ignoring its admonition. And many years after, I found myself jumping off from a spacecraft that hovered in the lower skies. One thousand feet away from the comfort of fibrous grass. An astronomical suicide.

It took six seconds to remember why. 

Dragonflies. A whole swarm of them whirring around me. A sound of crumpled Japanese papers. Their blue, opalescent bodies and translucent wings went for my eyes, my face, my arms, my legs. A retaliation for their murdered ancestors.

Then, I heard it. A woman’s scream. 

I looked up to the same diospyros tree. The velvet apples glowed like oriental lanterns. And there you were. Hanging desperately onto the branches. I could still remember the tears in your eyes. How they shined and fell down to mine. 

“Let go!” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll catch you!”

“NO!”

“Trust me!”

And with slight hesitation, you did. You dove right into my arms.  

It took five seconds to remember you.

And four seconds to fall in love with you again. 

We met because of gravity. Two bodies with mass forced to unite towards the center of the earth. That was the day you wore your blue, chrysanthemum swing dress. I got astray in your eyes that were a pair of dark Jupiters. They glimmered like five thousand Milkyways. And I had never found my way back ever since. Your long, black hair brimmed over my arms. I smiled. You looked away. I put you down. You looked back at me.

You were named after a tragic flower. “It’s Rose,” you said, and I shook your hand. Your warmth frightened me, haunted me, destroyed me. 

I asked you to meet me again.

You smiled. 

I was formed.

And that was the day I stopped looking at the sky. Because I had already found you. 

It took three seconds to fall.

And to fall apart.

On the shore, our fingers prowled the sand for seashells. The waves frothed and crashed against our intertwined legs. You giggled at their immortal persistence. And I kissed you on your forehead.

“Are you happy?” I asked. You cried for a very long time.

“Happiness is like waves.” You said. “They recede before you get to touch them. And they crash while you’re looking at the sky.”

We were both in utopia for a while until dark, dense cumulonimbus clouds loomed above us. I told you we should leave, but you refused.   

“Our Nicolai always loved stormy skies.” You said.

“Do you miss her?” 

You looked at me, eyes glistening. “Every...second...” You whispered.

I held on tightly to your shoulders. “Our daughter is in a better place now.”

But you stood up and walked into the water. I watched you, baffled at the way you emptily gazed at the sea. The milkyways were already drained from your eyes.

 “Nikol!” You called my name and pointed at the ocean. Waves gathered in squares, shaping the water into an oceanic chessboard. I didn’t know anything about oceans, but I knew I was seeing a catastrophe before me.

While you saw something else.    

“She’s there, Nikol! She’s waving at me!”

“Rose! No! Come back!”

“I have to go there,” you said. “She’s calling for me.”

You waded in. Feet, waist, shoulders, neck into one of its opened jaws. I ran and called you to come back. But the waves pushed me away. Lightning split the shore and sea apart. You were gone.

It took two seconds to open my eyes.

And now, I was landing into the ocean where I lost you. 

That day you disappeared, I had died. My body walked itself to the shore and waited for you. But you never came. It looked for you in every grain of sand. Over the hills. At the bottom of mystical sinkholes. You disappeared as though you had never existed. 

In one of those sleepless nights as I haunted the streets for a fragment of your being. I wondered if you had been taken away by a wormhole lurking in the abyss of the sea and had ferried you into outer space. I began hating the sea, the world, the sky−I found myself gazing at it for the first in a long time. 

But as I went, I had fathomed that beyond the blueness of the sky was nothing but a black, unfinished canvas. You were too bright to be there. 

Heaven was darkness.

It took one second to smile.

Like the sea that was nothing but a mirror of the sky, 

flying and falling were the same.

But, it took a lifetime to drown.