COCKATOO'S FLIGHT — MICHELLE XU
/In my dreams, he finds me on the thrice-waxed floor of our old high school gym. Clumps of shadows are clapping for some spectacle in center court, a wrestling match, a theater scene, a tango of purple cockatoos perhaps, but I am leaning against the bleachers’ plastic wrinkles and scanning for a familiar face. Then he strides into view, sixteen again in cargo shorts stuffed with cinnamon gum, knocks his shoulder against mine and whispers:
“I’m sorry.”
Sometimes he takes my hand first. Sometimes he kisses my cheek farewell. Sometimes we rush into the center of the crowd and each grab a cockatoo’s tail, bursting through the ceiling of tessellated fluorescence, upwards like the birth of two stars in the night.
But either way, I stop wondering what came first: him loving me or him wanting to leave his girlfriend. (Instead I leave him, trampolining off the clouds into thinner and thinner air.) I stop fearing the corroding mists of rumors after every date. (Instead I twirl free like a cockatoo, purple invisible against ink sky.) And I stop dreaming of him inside this dream, no longer confused by how a cinnamon kiss, shared, could mark only one target.
(Instead, the sky up here is clear. I soar.)
Michelle Xu is a physicist by day and writer by night. Her work has appeared in Riggwelter Press, and she runs a compost heap of a writing blog at colorcompendium.wordpress.com.
