The House of Tiny Whispers

Dream of Flying

Whenever anybody says to me 'anything is possible', I always say 'humans will never fly unaided'.

We can go anywhere in the world with a jet engine, sat back in a seat like a dentist's chair and looking out of a tiny little window and listening to the low steady buzz of the engines, enclosed in a metal cigarette. Or we can go on wind power, suspended under a swollen, pregnant balloon and looking down on patchwork fields, letting ourselves be gently swayed by the breeze and pretending we're close to nature.

But pure flight, no. We will never evolve wings. We will never soar like birds, skim over ponds like dragonflies, free and effortless. We are anchored to the ground.

In my dreams I fly. I sit up in bed and peel away the bedclothes that are smothering me and I slide on a jacket over my PJs and I leave my room. Quietly, of course. I don't put on my slippers. I go to my sister's bedroom, where she is tucked up inside a fort of cuddly toys. Even if she wakes up she will think she is dreaming, or that is what I will tell her in the morning. But she doesn't wake up. Her thumb is in her mouth and when she is asleep like this, guarded by teddy bears and stuffed rabbits, she looks half her age. Sleeping like a baby. Carefully, I slot my fingers into her window and open it, pushing it outwards and letting my first feeling of the night air slip over my face. I do not hesitate. This is nice, but there is better coming. So I lift myself out and onto the sloping ledge over the conservatory, and from there I grab the drainpipe and shimmy up to the roof.

I can stand on the roof, so I do. The streetlights here are not hooded and they spill their pollution upwards and blot out the feeling of the moonlight. You cannot bathe in electric light. My fingers are orange with it, the nails clipped almost brutally short. I used to bite them. I don't now.

Not too far into the distance, the motorway hums. Lorries, mostly, at this time of night. If I squint at the right gap I can see their streaks. Tired night-men, fuelled on coffee and pictures of their loved ones stuck up in their cabins, right opposite the pictures of girls with skin as pure and hairless as babies, breasts spilling over their arms, eyes half-closed so you can't see how they're dying inside. They stare across the cabin at each other, these nameless girls who are all heavy, promising flesh staring at the wives and daughters with their happy-family poses and loving eyes. The lorry driver whistles a song and takes another sip of McDonald's coffee.

I have often been told I have an overactive imagination. I don't. Overactive imaginations see big things, they see wide things, and I narrow in and imagine the small. Still. It may be true. That may account for the flying.

Like an aeroplane, a metal cigar spewing pollution across the sky it believes it owns, it's the take-off which is the hard part. It's amazing, it's sublime, it's impossible to describe, the stretch as my body rises and curves into the sky. My feet are no longer suckered to the ground; I am floating, I am in ecstasy, I am flying.

I am flying.

It is impossible. It is impossible to think about it, as though if I get too close it will desert me and leave me to plummett free-fall, no support net, to fall and reach out for anything to cling to and to find nothing. It is as though you are constantly on the edge, thrilled and fearful, and only by not thinking about the fact that I am flying can I forget how close it is to falling.

So instead of thinking that I am flying, I accept it as fact and go in search of other wonders.

There are people who commune with nature. City slickers on holiday in remote woodland villages, hiking over rugged moors and pretending that they are at one with the jutting rocks, which in fact are hostile and will trip them, break their spines, crack their skulls. In the woods a bear may eat them. These urban visionaries wear tight, comfortable yoga clothes and wish they were trees and they stay in chalets, or in tents, protected. I am not. I am bare to the elements, in nothing but my PJs and my jacket; they are free to have their way with me and I cannot defend myself against the wind, the heat, the rain. The feeling is so beautiful that it aches.