Around a year ago to this day, I found out I had gotten into college. I remember the feeling of a great burden eased, and a lightness in my chest, the creak of my ribs as I breathed my first full breath in months. I remember feeling as if my life were finally about to begin.
Outside, the skies had sobbed—the so-called storm of the century, sensational media mused, was healthily underway. She leaked fat droplets, pounded on the roof, and whistled with gusts of clean, cold wind.
When I landed in this country 11 years, ten months, and 11 days ago, I made a promise to myself, sought to bound my small body to the concrete jungle with gravel vines. The American dream, my father had said, and I remember I wanted desperately to make sure that I would never wake up.
I no longer remember what my promise was. In the years since that landing, I have fled from the stifling heat of the concrete maze to which I first pledged myself. Yet I am reminded daily of its vagrancy, which returns during the least suspecting moments, coarse concrete curling into fingers, haunting jutted apostrophes and sharp syllables with its elusive grasp.
Eleven years, ten months, and 11 days have passed since that pact. Lightning shuddered and silky streams ran down chapped bark, and I wondered if I was still dreaming.
Later that night, under the dim glow of my bedside lamp, I tried vainly to jot down the feeling of soaring. It did not come, so instead, I lay in bed, fingers itching, smile twitching, trapped in a paradisaical ennui. The clock ticked, its steady strain regulating the syncopated patter of the drumming rain. I remember feeling soothed by this soft melody, whose even breaths lent the night a promise of uniformity, as I lay thirsting for the muse of rest. Her flouncing skirt resisted my steady tread, volatile pleats scampered tauntingly away from the heavy gait of drooping eyelids with a coquettishness foreign to a 6-year-old with a bowl cut.
When eventually the heavy blanket of listlessness overwhelmed me, sleep tiptoed to my bedside. She hid beneath the soft whistle of the wind, in a facade of airiness. But I knew her tricks, knew the way she slid herself atop me, a thick coat of feather and cotton pressing down on my ribs, forcing me to forget, once again, how to breathe.
These nights, I use no comforter, instead wrapping myself in an airy layer of linen, toes peeping out from truncated bottom. In the quiet Massachusetts night, pale flakes of snow dance, twirling leisurely to the crinkle of near-zero frost. My sleep is still of the flighty sort, only, liberated from the oppression of dense wool and pounding rain, it is remembering how to fly again.
