I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun has just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneously from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself.
He's been falling, tumbling through the air. But this time the darkness is alive around him, full of beating things, and he realizes that he's not surrounded by dark but has only had his eyes closed all this time. He opens them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterflies take off around him, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below him. All green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath him. And the air around him is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and he's laughing, laughing, laughing as he spins through the air because, of course, he hasn't been falling all the time. He's been flying.
