text: “Ever since I was a little girl I’ve been able to see through the eyes of birds. It works on any bird I’m close to--there’s some power in me that reaches out to their brains, and I can see what they’re looking at through their eyes for as long as I want. The only problem is that I can’t feel what they feel, or control them at all, or take on their bodies as my own. That problem seems small when you consider how incredible the power still is--but I assure you it has completely and thoroughly ruined my life. Maybe it only did that because I let it. Maybe if I had been a more positive or mentally strong person, I would have used my power for good and not cared about the limitations. I would have been some sort of elite sniper who could spot any target, or a magician, or a cartographer, or some other useful type of person. As it turns out, though, it appears I used my power to become a depressed loser. I don’t remember exactly when I learned what I could do, but the way I used it started out real simple--as a little girl, on summer days when my mom was at work, I would wander through the forest and connect to the eyes of sparrows and robins. I would sit my heavy body on a stump or lay it on a patch of moss and watch for hours through their eyes, swooping through the leafy canopies of trees, catching worms, building nests, feeding babies. For a while that was all it was--just a fun distraction, a way to spend a summer day. As I got older though, life started happening to me, and along with that came some nastier things. I began to get into a habit--whenever anything really bad happened to me--when my mom would throw shit at me or when I fell off my bike and exploded my leg into a thousand pieces, or when I got laughed at for being fat or...when a bear stumbled across me lying motionless on the forest floor--I would watch whatever happened not through my own eyes, but through the eyes of the birds. Everything looked so poetic through their eyes--people were reduced to tiny specks, atoms colliding and bouncing off one another, just a biological and inevitable process. Most of the times the birds would only watch what was happening to me for a few seconds--then they would look elsewhere, to a bug or a rabbit or the wide open sky, and I would focus hard on being the bird and forget what was happening to my human body down below. How wonderful it was to see my own life as an outsider, put into what I felt was proper perspective--no matter how much pain I was in or how much I wanted to kill the person who was hurting me, I would close my eyes and open the bird’s, and look at myself through from high above--and feel that I knew that nothing really mattered. As time went on I became more and more detached from my own eyes and my own body and I did nothing but watch the world through the birds, and I lay inside all day in the dark and I longed. I longed for my bones to be hollow, for my head to be empty, for the currents and updrafts of wind to push me upwards high above the earth rather than throwing me backwards and fucking up my umbrellas. I started to feel like the world had been built for birds and not for me. Why else would so much of it be sky and open air? Why did I have to spend my life confined to the ground? I gave being human a shot. I promise I did. I did middle school and high school and tried to date and tried to play sports and tried to care and tried to love my mom and tried to love myself, and yet every day I would find myself returning to the eyes of the birds. I began to feel overwhelmingly that nothing could compare to what I couldn’t have--to fully be a bird and to leave all of the stupid squabbles and entanglements of human life behind. When I graduated high school and summer came I locked my door, turned off my lights, and I committed myself, beyond anything, to forgetting that I was human. My mom worked so much she didn’t have enough time to care and no one else was around to notice. I barely ate, I barely slept. At night instead of sleeping I would watch through the eyes of owls, relishing their night vision, praying to every God I could that somehow the psychic connection would short out and my consciousness would be flipped with the owl’s, and my mom would do one of her nightly checks and find a girl with an owl’s brain flapping around the room while I soared and smiled and hunted for mice in my forest. It never happened, of course, and every time I fell asleep against my will, I would wake up for a few painful seconds as the species I hated in a body I despised that I made no effort to upkeep, with my mother pounding on my door to offer me food that made me want to vomit just from the sight of it. I would close my human eyes and connect to the eyes of a bird as fast as I could before I could fully remember who I really was. My weight dropped so, so low, until my bones felt hollow and my head felt empty, and after a few months of focusing on nothing but being a bird, I felt as if the wind might finally treat me like one. So late one August night, looking through my own eyes, I climbed up to the very peak of the roof of my two-story house, and I thought about trying to fly--not in some clunky stupid cartoon way with cardboard wings where I drop like a stone and splat on the pavement--but for real, using all the techniques I’ve learned from the birds, using my new body. I thought that maybe watching the world through their eyes for more hours than I’ve watched it through my own has given me some special--relationship. With the air. I thought maybe the wind would think I’m one of them and carry me. And then you saw me standing up here, and you got off your bike and climbed up the tree and onto the roof and you asked me to tell you what was going on, and for some reason I broke down and told you all of this and I’ve been talking for so long and you haven’t been saying anything, and I think I feel stupider and more embarrassed than I’ve ever felt in my entire fucking life.” A thick August wind blew softly through the trees, and Serena wiped tears from under her dark, sunken eyes. She was winded from speaking for so long. She usually tried not to speak--it was more effort than she remembered. She suddenly felt very, very cold, and she wrapped her bony arms tightly around herself and looked at Tim. Tim was scrawny, and a little sweaty, and a little drunk, and he swayed slightly on the roof six feet from Serena. He had big eyes that took up too much of his face and no idea what to say. He stared at Serena for a while, trying to process everything she had just said, trying to imagine the life of the translucently-pale, shivering, tiny girl who stood before him, one foot on either side of the roof’s spine. They had gone to high school together but he had never spoken a single word to her or about her. He thought about how weirdly pretty she looked and then spent a much longer time thinking about how that wasn’t really an acceptable thought to have when she was in such distress. It occurred to him that what he said next might be one of the most important things he had ever said in his entire life, because he was pretty sure this girl had never told any of this to anyone and if he said something wrong he was basically going to shit on her whole life and destroy it. He wasn’t fully sure why he believed her. But he did. Serena took a slow step towards him, feeling suddenly that she *needed* something from this kind of goofy-looking guy who had interrupted what she now realized was almost 100% a suicide attempt. Although there had been some part of her that thought she was going to fly, there was a much larger, more realistic part that knew what was going to happen. Tim and Serena stood still, looking at each other, five feet apart on the roof. The August wind blew again, taunting her, feeling so full-bodied and strong that she felt *surely* it could carry her, and she thought about how she had not looked through her own eyes for this long in months. The burden of being in her own body felt unbearable again. She took a step back towards the edge of the roof. Tim, still having said absolutely nothing, stepped forward, one step, keeping his distance exactly the same as before. She took one more step back, and he one forward. Again. This time her bare heels kissed the very edge of the roof, which flexed under her weight. She swayed in the wind, and Tim swayed from the beers in his bloodstream, and then he finally spoke, abandoning the hundreds of sentence rough-drafts he had been accumulating during the silence and going with his gut. “You really think the wind’s good enough?” “What?” “To fly. You think the wind’s good enough to fly?” Tim smiled at her with an expression that he figured was close to his idea of coy. She looked away from him. “No. Not really.” “Not *really.* So you kinda do.” Serena stayed quiet. She felt like she was being mocked. “Cause--I’m a pretty skinny guy. I don’t know much about birds, but--if you’re saying it’s doable, I trust your judgement. It feels strong tonight.” Tim suddenly strode to the edge of the roof right next to Serena, and dangled his toes over the edge, and grinned at her with the biggest, stupidest grin he could put on. Slowly she turned around and put her toes over the edge, too. His smile grew even wider, and he began to feel a pressure in his chest and a strange magnet-like pull to this tiny, bony girl on the edge of the roof, shivering and trying not to return his smile. He wasn’t really sure what he was doing or what character he was playing but the alcohol felt warm in his stomach and the wind was cool and he couldn’t stop staring into Serena’s eyes, and he felt like everything he said was smoother than he could have possibly hoped for. “Hey. Are you looking at me with the birds’ eyes? Or yours?” Serena looked into his eyes with hers, and imagined what it would be like to see herself through his. She wondered how different his sight was from a bird’s. She wondered what she looked like to him. She realized it was taking her way too long to answer. “Mine.” “Isn’t it so much better this way? To be in your body, to have control over what you’re doing--to feel the wind on your face?” The wind, as if in harmony with Tim, rose up and passed over them both. Serena blushed a little. “Yeah. It does.” “I don’t really know you, but--I don’t think you should be a bird. I think you should be you. Maybe what you have isn’t perfect. But at least it’s yours.” Serena smiled as she hadn’t in years, and Tim smiled too. Against all of the cowardice he had known in his life, he obeyed his chest and leaned in to kiss her, and against all of her desires to be a bird, she closed her eyes and leaned towards him and allowed herself to be human, and their lips touched, and then the wind blew hard and Tim stumbled off the roof into the shadowy blackness below. Before she had time to think, Serena went off the roof after him, and her fingers stretched as wide as they could, reaching for his. She was too late. She heard the great harmonious whoosh of the wind and the bone-rattling smack of Tim against the hard asphalt of the driveway simultaneously. She braced for her own smack, but it didn’t come. When she opened her eyes she saw a vast vista, her entire town stretching out underneath her, orange lights twinkling in the summer night. She thought she had done what she always did when something terrible happened and switched to a bird’s eyes--until she looked down and saw her own pale, fragile body, being carried by the wind, high above the town. She realized the eyes she saw through were her own, and she could look around wherever she wanted, and then she realized she was truly flying, as herself. She felt the August wind on her face. Just for a second, to indulge herself, she connected to the birds all around. She could see herself through the eyes of every one of them, the wind carrying her higher and higher above the town, looking bold and majestic and finally like she belonged. Then she watched through the birds’ eyes as she began to descend, first ever so slightly, then very unslightly, and she felt the tender hands of the wind that had raised her so high slip away. She was falling fast now. She switched back into her own eyes and watched the red-stained asphalt of her driveway fast approaching, and for a second she was grateful that she was at least watching this through her own eyes. It *was* nicer to be in her own body, to feel the wind on her face, although this wind was very harsh and loud and nothing like the wind that had carried her just a few seconds ago. She briefly hoped that Tim was alive, and then she thought about how funny it was that her last thought was going to be about a person she had only really known for ten minutes. Then she looked down. She reached out towards the ground, and she felt her fingers brush Tim ever so slightly, and then she felt the smallest gust of August wind push against her chest and carry her for just a second. Then she hit, and she felt her legs shatter and explode, and she felt herself screaming. Tears streamed down her face--then a weak, bloody hand grabbed hers and squeezed, just a little. She looked to her left, writhing in pain. Tim smiled at her from a pool of his own blood on the asphalt. She smiled back, just a little bit, and the two of them closed their eyes together and listened to the sound of sirens in the distance.