Upward

Looking up from the backyard, a fire burning orange in the pit. Warm, but not enough to kill the freshness of the night.

The moon shines coldly through a circle in the trees as I slowly start to float upwards, silvery beams caught in the lacework of the twigs shedding their leaves.

Suddenly, I rush upward, the wind coursing around my frame, engaging the senses so much that after a few minutes I am overwhelmed with the feel of a thousand thousand tiny feathers of air wisping past my skin.

I look up at the countless stars, feeling the weight of the atmosphere as it presses me back towards the earth, but I whistle through it, gliding, soaring upwards. Straight up. Up and Up towards the dark and the burning white of the tiny points of light shimmering just outside the earth. I squint my eyes, making them clearer.

I turn my head downward, looking back at the earth from whence I rose. My home. My planet. It is dark, details indistinguishable at this lofty height. But I can see lights. As tiny as the stars above, but orange and red and blue; a rainbow of dots in the black. Lines of lights mark roads, buildings. Everything quickly shrinking below me.

I punch through a cloud and the lights below me disappear; replaced by rolling hills of white and blue light and soft shadow. It feels like nothing; but leaves droplets glistening like silver on my pale skin. The air thins. I speed faster, the resistance less. The air here is always cold; frozen; the droplets crystallize on my skin, the pull of them tightens the hairs on my arm.

Suddenly, blessedly, the rush of the wind in my ears ceases. I continue my unthinkingly fast journey, but all I hear is the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears as it pulses: One, two. One, two. I am alive. I look above at the moon, clearer than I have ever seen it; sharp, stark, celestial white against the purest black my eyes have ever beheld; dotted throughout by billions of stars. Each one with its own system of planets like the one I just left. I am alive. Dear God, I am alive. My eyes blink tears of ecstasy, and they float away from me, perfectly round drops of ice.

I float; suspended over the massive curved horizon of my planet. it takes up the entirety of my view. And yet it is so small...

My hair lifts, each strand weightless and flowing.

The round horizon becomes a smaller sphere, still dark but dotted with lights. This time, instead of streets; the lights mark the edges of whole continents.

The deepest black is the ocean; yet nowhere in living darkness can it compare with the utter void of space itself.

And yet I am not afraid. I revel in it. I am tiny. Incomprehensibly tiny. And yet I can see this.

I can see all of this.

And I understand its significance

The weight of it is freeing, somehow.

I see the earth turn. The sun shines golden; pure fire. Life. Warmth. And the earth slowly turns to blue as I rotate around its circumference. Blue as the moonlight, but warmer. Greens and browns surface; the atmosphere, far below me, dotted with clouds like the wisps of some painting composed by the ebbing of time itself into spiral patterns.

That is where I am from.

Earth.

And I look outward.

To the stars.

That is where I am going.