I Can Fly

“I can fly!” she said, her voice teeming with joy as she danced across the blossoming fields. She then clumsily twirled and skipped towards her mother, who lay across a picnic blanket, earning a playful chuckle from her. “Just like an angel” Her mother said before embracing her in a hug. “What’s an angel?” the little girl asked as her mother let her go.

 “An angel is a person, a beautiful person, with incredible wings, that watches over us…” The mother paused and inhaled deeply before continuing on, ” … you see, when you die, if you have been extra good, you become an angel and watch over your loved ones.”

At this closing statement a tear formed in the corner of her mother’s eye. 

“If they are so good then why are you sad?” The little girl asked inquisitively, noticing how her mothers eyes retracted from a rich blue to a distant grey as she finished.

This is where things began to blur in the eyes of the little girl, who I suppose is no longer that little at all. But what she does remember she wished she could forget.

It pains her that she cannot remember the last of her mother’s sweet voice.

It pains her that for a while she didn’t understand why her mother was sad or why she said the words that she could hardly remember with such sincerity.

It pains her that this was one of the last times that she would ever hear this voice and she had been too much in her own world to fully understand that sometimes people aren’t okay , her mother wasn’t okay… 

“Just know that they are always watching. . .  Just look to the sky, okay?”

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“I can fly” she whispered as she shuffled closer to the edge.

Her eyes sorrowful, her legs trembling as she took another small shuffle forwards, her gaze focused intensely on the stars above. “I can…fly”. This time it was barely audible as she reminisced, those days where things were good or when they meant anything at all, before reaching her final destination.