By Mahru Elahi
In my dreams, I am dressed in loose clothing and rise into the air with only a thought, guided by the warmth in my belly. Usually it is night, but sometimes the sun is out. I am alone and curious, and propel myself high above the landscape, delighting in the patterned streets and rolling hills, the geometry of buildings. When I wake from these dreams, the feeling in my belly is a reminder of where I’ve gone. I replay gauzy snatches of dream-memory throughout the day, the lightness that filled me. I want to return, to live again suspended above the earth.
I have always had dreams of flight. They come less often the older I get, and I am missing something from their absence.
Back in the third grade, I convinced myself that—if I tried hard enough—I could fly outside of the dream world. One chilly March morning, I walked all the way to the end of the school blacktop, where the chain-link fence was flush with the street.
I exhaled a cloud of condensation and began to pivot in tight circles. I was sure that this spiral would be the accelerator needed to launch me from the ground. Never mind that I was replaying an ancestral memory with this spinning: I was a semazen, a whirling dervish. Never mind that I was attempting to open a portal that had nothing to do with flying, not really. Like a semazen, I was summoning the door to another reality: one where I wasn’t split in two, where Mom and Baba had never divorced.
It was still early, and no other kids were in sight when the elementary school blacktop began to spin and spin, a blur of streaming bands of color. My limbs of no use, my limbs suddenly an afterthought, tucked away somewhere out of sight. I was sure that I felt lifted up—somehow, at least for a moment—before I fell. I tried again, my palms stinging from the first fall. I wanted to get lost in the swirl: the blacktop now above me, now to my side. The blacktop resting on my cheek as I opened my eyes and rubbed my ear, now stinging with the same ferocity as my palms.
I didn’t try a third time.
After I gave up on trying to fly furtively, I gravitated toward the big sandpit. There, I came the closest to flight—my body maintaining a hover with no conveyance other than a thin rubber seat and my legs pumping under me—on the swings. The frame of the swing set was at least twelve feet high. If I swung my legs hard enough, engaging the warmth in my belly as I leaned back, using my body’s weight to accelerate the hurtle forward, I could get at least eight feet of clearance from the ground. The swirl would begin, the long bands of color allowing me to slide along their stuttering axis, the horizon in flux. The portal, opening again. The swing, a giant hinge that transmuted grief—rising up, spilling out of my open mouth, and entering the air as laughter.
Mahru Elahi (she/her/they/او) is a queer Iranian American femme. She has received support from Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices, Hedgebrook, Tin House, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Antioch University Los Angeles, and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. IG: @mahru_elahi | website: mahruelahi.com