Bird Girl

She would have the most vivid dream. Over and over.
One minute she was lying in her bed, elbows tucked sharply over the edge of her doona cover, eyes firmly shut with the determination to sleep and then….

She was leaping out of bed, pulling her clothes on almost ferociously, not caring for rips or tugs, eyes looking towards the door. She would lurch ungracefully out of it and launch herself off the front porch. She looked just like someone racing for the train, but travelling upwards instead of across.
She would quickly pick up pace over the grey sprawl that she had left behind, her feet dangling behind her and the wind moaning through her hair. The sun was always just at that undecided point between night and day, peeking hesitantly and palely over the edge of the world. Everything was smothered in a cool lemony yellow, with dark night around the edges. 

She could see people just like her, doing just what they did every day. An old Turkish woman two streets over watered her flowers like she did every morning. A scruffy 20 something stumbled barefoot along the footpath, trying to avoid the broken crumbles of glass. The garbage trucks hauled themselves thunderously along the streets, chewing piles of other peoples discards in their monstrous mouths. And so many people stumbled bleary eyed and a little damp from their houses, facing another insufferable but tolerated work day.

Why do they do it? She would ask aloud; when they could just spend their time up here with the wind, a few birds and the occasional errant balloon or kite. None of those things seemed important up here. It was just meaningless, nothingness, emptiness. 
Up there she could feel them. The misery of all those bodies below her seemed far more tangible than normal. When she was far away from all those similar trials that occupied her mind she could hear the hearts of everyone.

The cries, moans, sobs and silent prayers floated up to her as she drifted along and seemed to leak into her skin. She would sometimes cry for them, her tears dropping on the road below, looking just like rain.

But mostly she would just try and fly higher, where the sound couldn’t reach her; where all she could hear was the puffy trail of the endlessly moving clouds.

When she woke, she would not remember what she had felt up there. She would only feel a deep aching in her bones.