Corner of the Sky

**Everything has its season
Everything has its time
Show me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhyme
Cats fit on the windowsill Children fit in the snow
Why do I feel I don't fit in anywhere I go?

I could fly, without a plane, without personal wings. I flew.

Not just flew, I soared higher and higher with each trip, the beginning and ending points the same each time with the middle parts of the forays varying mightily.

For most of my growing up I shared a bedroom with my brothers. The earliest part of that sharing had us in bunk beds with me on the bottom and them up top. I think I was 4 or so when I took my first flight.

To say it scared the barrettes out of my tightly wound hair would be putting it mildly. Luckily our room was right off the bathroom. After tip-toeing to and from the bathroom, I detoured to the living room. Mom often found me curled up on the sofa.

These middle of the night flights lasted for several years. Through the divorce, through our descent into poverty, through my brothers’ affiliations with gangs and drugs, through living with relatives, through me moving to my own bedrooms, always with a curtain, never a door. Through it all, the trips became less and less frightening and though I remained afraid of heights I began to welcome the flights. I’d perch atop some spire, sit and peer down into that which was my life and try to figure out how to make being down there less scary, less foreign.

I began to feel at home in the sky. I remember wishing that the winds would just carry me away, far away. But of course, they never did and the realization struck that I'd have to find my corner of the sky, on the ground.

I don't remember when the flights ended, but I do remember soaring at seventeen. I walked out of that last curtained bedroom, loading everything my brothers hadn't stolen from me into my piece of shit car and driving away from what masqueraded as home and to a place that turned out to be the first of a few corners cozy enough to be called home and my own.

**Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I've got to be where my spirit can run free
Got to find my corner of the sky

**Corner of the Sky from "Pippen"