People in the Sky

She wants to take flight with the people in the sky.

How glorious they are in these inglorious times.
How valiant, how free.

What she finds most alluring is this: they are sailing to a far-off place where she can change the arc of her dreams.

After all, on this island where she lives, real life is darker than your darkest dreams.

The system turning on you, opening fire on you. The dunes of denial. The limp untruths.

She has stopped counting the dead, the missing, the great streaks of blood on the streets. She has swallowed her last morsel of hope. She has never felt more alone.

Now the people in the sky are her sole source of delight. Watching them brings a full thrill of possibility. She, too, can drift away in a fancy flying vessel. She, too, can look elegant in a top hat, perch on a giant sail, float by herself.

She longs to be open to the world again, to be wholly rid of this aloneness, this despair that knows her mother's middle name.

And so one slow morning, she caves and screams, 'Take me with you, please. Take me.'

But the people in the sky carry on, eyes ahead and heads lifted, snootily silent and silently snooty, until she begins to seethe.

What she doesn't know, of course, is that the people in the sky aren't really there.