Paperweight
(ST Microfiction, Theme: The Great Escape)
It is the perfect day for kite-flying. The green field beckons and a kite takes a little girl out into the soft morning.
The kite fidgets in her hands, eager to begin. The girl unwinds the string and throws the kite into the air. Back and forth, back and forth, the kite and the girl engage in the dated dance of courtship, she tugging at her heartstrings, always teasing and pulling away; she releasing her into the world of dreams, contented with being her anchor to the here and now. In the breeze, we both are the flying, this one time of our lives when time stops.
Down below, the girl chases the kite with her ardent gaze, seeking out the speck tainting the sheet of blue that is their sky.
Up above, the wind is her accomplice, its tempting melody drawing her further and higher up into the air. Away from the girl, she flies closer and closer to the sun, one Icarus sans wings, soaring on a single thread thin enough to toe the line between right and wrong. Just close by, the clouds discuss our swift exit of sensibility.
It is hardly catastrophic when it happens. The wind’s whispers sharpen the blade I hold and before long the kite is no longer borne on a string but on the imaginations of us both. The kite cackles in delight, its wish fulfilled. The girl remains in the dark. The sun shines.
It is hardly catastrophic when it happens. A faint, insignificant tugging, a protest mumbled and ignored, then faster, faster, away. Let fly all pretence of affection, heartache and despair!
Come back to me, she cries, come back to me!
The kite sails across the sky and executes a couple of nosedives with a seasoned flourish. Released, she twirls and curtseys and laughs, laughing so hard till the tears finally come and fall as the shards of rain walling her second prison. Away from her, away from you, she drifts in the limbo between emptiness and a dying star, an ever-fixed mark for review and ridicule.
The little girl stands forlorn and movingly engages in copious amounts of non-committal weeping. While the kite performs double cartwheels and triple back flips, it is she who is wheeling through space, experiencing free fall for a second time. Time passes and she lingers. Time passes and she goes, breathing again but always in the orbit of this broken circle.
I hope there is no escaping this grief that haunts their every step. Because with it I compare the heavier grief of now and am able to recall, briefly, joy as it once was. Even so, its memory is fringed with a constant reminder that our eventual consequence of escape is capture, of avoidance is confrontation, of infatuation is indifference. And an escape from love, into what we have supposed to be love, can only result in empty giving.
After all, kite-flying’s only a child’s daydream, isn’t it?