Are parades celebration, or simply pebbled streets we stalk? Are they characters, or crimson, lighted alley-ways? Are they dances or daughdry escapes, all done up in drag?
To write about the literal here, what exists, what I cannot exit, would be to write of zig-zagged bike rides before dawn, movie-theaters with assigned seats, peanut oil seeped under skin. It would be to write of dangerous dancing, dribbles of wine, Borat-clad classmates, girls in ties, the crispest of morning lights. It would be to write of North Parade and its constant Christmas strings; the soft-disappointment at missing shortbread; the short braids of tears that are called from the cold. It would be to write of this street, hidden behind a churchwalk, pillaged by passer-bys where windows are awake with another world, un-shattered, showing their rounded, pregant bellies of memorabilia and kind kisses inside of our eyes.
What I like to write out, instead, are the emotions of this world, this walk, the parade (in both a celebratory and geographical sense) that I live each and every day here. It would be to explain the sharp shocks of gray, hands reaching for the small of my back, the weight of curtains, the closest I could be to a fairytale in a novel, foreign, faraway land.
So we are missing witches and warlocks. We are missing princes, of course, and kissable toads. But there is something here, within us, much more magic than I ever witnessed at home. Could the cause be the arches of architecture, the always-changing leaves, mood-rings around our insides, tame at daybreak, adorned in the demise of day?
It is something that reveals itself beneath our gowns, in the bent sunlight on shorn christmas trees, stone houses and open windows where we can surely swing our legs. Broken normalcy. Slippery, buttered-up wings that fly, float in pieces, that fail to bring us back to the hardened earth. It is the wings that save, not the journeys: the places reached above the wanted, wished-for, willed. The moments beyond broken hearts, broken promises. New beginnings, perhaps, but not only new. Far farther above, far more skilled at taking flight .
Because it is ok to run away sometimes, to hide or take deep breaths--breaths that cannot be seen in every winter wind, but speak (if only for a second) what we cannot say in words: they are the crowded clouds we have seeped in, in our fretful flights, in our dreams of falling. Sometimes, they break through our crowns of sky, our tattered teeth, our tied tongues. And they admit to what hurts the most, they give not only witness but life. And these wings, however slight, they are sights to be seen, they are the saddest sighs of relief.
So when I write about parades, about celebrating, about long walks that seem far-away and faintly French, I write about the racket, I write about the speed of my heart. I know. I know that the strength has been given to me to get through, beyond this: to now beckon my own buttery wings.