Touch the Sky

Many times I entrusted my body to something resembling flight, not in order to arrive, but to remain in that instant when the ground had not yet decided to reclaim me. Wings—if they can still be called that—took on a different form each time: sometimes stretched and assured, sometimes trembling, sometimes so exhausted that they resembled the memory of flight more than flight itself. Altitude was always unstable, and balance only a temporary agreement, rewritten with every shift of air.

Freedom was always slightly higher. Not distant enough to abandon, not close enough to be safe. Each time I moved nearer, the air grew thinner and the light heavier than it had promised.

Flight began precisely where light ceased to be a promise and became a verdict.

Even so, something in me was incapable of retreat—an old insistence that remembered failure but not danger. The attempt repeated itself, not out of courage, but out of an inability to accept the altitude assigned to me. Each time, the body lagged behind desire, and movement outpaced form.

What remained suspended in the air was no longer my image, but a trace of passage—elongated, fractured, held in tension between ascent and return. I did not think of falling, nor of punishment. I thought only of that moment when excessive proximity to light erases the distinction between longing and error, when flight is neither triumph nor end, but a recurring habit of touching something never meant to endure.

Now, after so many failed and re-desired attempts, I no longer know whether what disappears is the wing or the will. I only know that somewhere between height and refusal, the body grows lighter, movement persists, and the return that was always promised is slowly emptied of possibility.