This life is slowly tearing me apart. I'm trying to grow wings in the hope that I can fly, but people tell me that my feet are crooked and I can't walk correctly. Little do they know, I'm close to flying over the competition like a seagull taking a shit over the entirety of a city. Where do my thoughts take me now? Should I shoot higher than the clouds beyond? Do these wings hold the power to lift me up above the life I had that was focused on the ground? Even my dreams seek escape from reality. Somehow, a sudden gust of wind always forces me back down to ground zero, where my past was drowned.
Why glide when you know that you can fly? People tell me to look at the ground, but I'm too busy staring at the monster in the sky. The king of darkness rests high in the stratosphere, barring access to those people below the clouds. His castle home is the paradise where I seek relief from the burrows that hide my life. This is my reprieve, but it's more of an eternal expedition where I hope to relieve my constant competition.
Before I seek hope in the light of day, I often find I've lost the words that I used to say. Canary birds chirp as I fly above, but the sadness that I seek seems to drag me lower than the lows of my deepest woes. Hummingbirds mock the speed of my wings, telling me that I'm missing an integral piece of an airborne cruise: a motivation. Where is the hope for a better life? What happened to being the hero of your own story? How can you be a hero if you don't even believe in yourself? And what kind of bird doesn't know how to fly? Penguins have a better grasp of aerodynamics than I do, which is really saying something because I've grown a pair of feathery wings. What kind of bird am I? Am I a mockingbird that doesn't sing? Am I a parrot that fails to mimic? Am I a hummingbird that cannot hover?
I tell myself to fly, but the free fall calculations from gravity tell me to die. Physics and acceleration slowly drag me down, throwing chains around my feet and pulling down. History lectures me about how this has happened before. How did I not learn from humanity's past mistakes? English spreads the word of my inevitable defeat, and French earnestly deciphers my surreal plunge. Businesses and corporations voraciously market my descent as I fall sporadically. Mathematics greedily adds the explosive profits from my humiliating failure. Finally, I decide that I'd rather fall back to the ground. Letting loose a feather from my diseased body, I allow it to flutter to the ground in order to appease the chains and shackles that aid in the abrupt cancellation of my plans. Each feather marks my accumulated failures over the years. At this point, I might as well try to fail. If I try to fail, perhaps I will succeed. A failed failure is a success, and a completed failure is a successful failure. Either way, I am benefited with the thought of success.
Now, as another of my feathers is plucked from the sky and thrown into the heaping ashes that lay in a tumultuous ruin across the ground, I sulk in anticipation of my next attempt at flight. I await the day where I fly higher than the jurisdiction of chains and shackles, higher than labels and titles, and higher than the ground I once called my home. I'm sick of being just another human being. I'm ready to be me, but apparently I’m the only one who is ready. One day they will let go of these chains, and I will ascend into the clouds. There will be no feathers left to pluck from my irritated body by the time I take the throne as a bird among skies.
Why glide down when you know that you can fly?