Flight

The rain was moving in. I watched the darkness make its way over the top of the mountain, down over the valley below, leaving only this field illuminated, then the next, like the flashlights they used to search for her. It inched ever nearer as I sat scribbling away, determined to finish the final pages before it reached me. I raced against the elements.

There had been posters along the journey, bold face type pleading for attention, big round eyes and an inviting smile. I stared at her picture. The word “missing” dropped from my mind to my heart and quickly sunk to the depths of my soul. The word “missing” was more sorrowful and lonely than I had ever known it to be. The word “missing” had lost all of its tender hope.

It was no longer a plea -- “Find me. Help me. Please.” Instead it stood as a reminder of all that was lost. -- “I’ve left. I’ve gone. Goodbye.”

Her body was found at the bottom of the waterfall.

I didn’t know her. I can’t recall ever seeing her at the guesthouse next door, dancing with the others on the porch while they banged their drums and sang their songs to the mountains. But she could have been there. She could have been.

Or she could have already left for her walk into the woods alone. She could have already been on the path to the waterfall when the clouds, swollen with rain, began to slowly emerge above the peaks. She could have already been standing there, listening to the rushes of the cascading waterfall quicken. Faster and faster they fell.

No one could determine exactly how it was she came to fall with them. Perhaps she slipped, perhaps she jumped, perhaps the wind nudged her to the edge. No one knew if she was gone before she hit the water, or if it was instant, or if she lay there crying out for hours before the darkness came. Whatever happened, she had left this world alone.

Six large birds flew above me, hovering on the fast approaching winds, escaping those places where the rain had already begun. I wondered if they had looked for her, if they had seen her final moments on this earth. Maybe this flight was a tribute to her, or maybe, she was this flight. She was the birds and their wings and the air beneath them. She was the impending rain and the shadowed fields and the earth that shook with thunder below my naked feet. She was the final pages of my journal and the words I would fill them with. She was gone and she was here. She was no longer missing.

I do not know what death is. I have no notion as to what will happen after I’m gone, but I’d like to think, I’d like to believe, that the birds will know the second my heart stops beating. I’d like to believe that they will take me in their gentle wings and, if even for an instant, allow me to hover above this grand earth and know what it feels like to soar. I’d like to believe that I’d see below, poised on a cliff, scribbling away to evade the imminent rain, a young writer who has only just begun the long journey of her life.

I will smile. I will say “yes, I was only beginning too.”