Free as a Bird

It feels like it's been a long time since I published anything...and as I look back on the post lists, it has been a long time. A couple of weeks, and a part of me is a little bit afraid of posting something now.

But they say that facing your fears is how you defeat them, and even though there is a part of me that will never like it, I know it is true. So here it is—a small winter snippet.

***

My fingers clench around the cold metal bars on the playground, and I pull myself up, up to the top of the structure, high above the ground. I gaze around me—the gray sky, the bone-chilling wind, the skeleton trees—and shiver. A deep breath, and I imagine a blanket wrapping around me, warm and soft and fuzzy. For a moment, I forget the cold as I focus on the imagined.

There is a strange sort of beauty to a day like this. Days like these are cold and harsh and gray—but there is a wild thrill to them, like they’re daring you. Daring you to come outside and race the wind down to the old forest, where the leaves have already started to become soft on the ground, and a few wisps of mist, leftover from the early morning, cling to the branches like ghost leaves. It’s the kind of day that leads you on and on and on, to keep running until you’re warm inside and you want to tear off your sweater.

Unable to stop the urge, I leap down from the monkey bars, my feet hitting the ground as my knees bend and I look to the sky—and I run. It almost feels like a day that belongs somewhere else, in a mystical world of werewolves and fae and magic.

My heart is pounding in my ears, and my feet are pounding on the uneven forest ground, and my hair is whipping around my head. For the first time in a long time, I am free. I’m not caged in by a small room, I’m not caged in by my thoughts, I’m not hidden away from the world. I am free—as free as a bird.

And I smile.