Flying Dreams

Seems to me, it's not my choice to be alive.  I am.  All at once, I was alive and my heart was beating and it's beating still.  When I was old enough to notice, I saw that I couldn't fly, and that mystified me because in my dreams I could fly and I did.  I just lifted up my arms and took a deep breath and lifted right up off the ground and kept going up.  I looked down on everything and hovered up there and kept watching things. 

Now and then, I have these slow-moving dreams where I can fly and off I go.  All my life I've had them.  I fly like superman does, arms out in front and horizontal to the ground, but I look down on the stuff down there below me and it feels far away, passing below me like a movie.  I've always flown in a way that you might call mysterious.  And that doesn't mean it's because I'm human and I don't have wings.  No.  It's the feeling of lifting up and taking that deep breath that does it, makes it mysterious and lot like hope rising up. 

Sometimes I know I'm going to have a flying dream and I just settle down and try to be patient for it, because you know what they say.  You notice a dream and it goes away.  So, if I'm kind of nonchalant about it - meaning I try to look like I don't care one way or the other - I can let the dream sneak into my bed and curl up with me and then it's mine. 

I have had times when I wished I really was in a flying dream and could lift up, like a bubble in water, up to the clouds and then stretch out my arms and decide which way to go away and then just go.  But, like being alive, lifting up above my troubles is not really my choice - at least by flying.  It's not my choice to have the troubles I do.  I have them.  They're there, like a mean dog.