A wing in the wind—
Not held by the earth,
Not yet part of the sky.
I watched the planes taxi down the runway, their blinking lights vanishing into the night like slow-moving stars. Beyond the glass, the engines rumbled, steady and distant, carrying people away from here, toward places I couldn’t see.
The airport had its own kind of silence—the absence of permanence. People sat in clusters, hunched over their phones, lost in conversations they weren’t really having. A woman across from me flipped through the pages of a paperback, though her eyes never settled on the words. A businessman scrolled through his messages, his fingers moving automatically, face blank. A child pressed his forehead against the glass, staring out at the planes with the quiet intensity of someone seeing something for the first time.
I was here, but not really. Not yet.
I checked my boarding pass again, though I already knew the details. A red-eye flight. A seat by the aisle. A city waiting on the other side—one I had left behind years ago, one that had continued without me, unbothered by my absence.
I wondered if I would recognize it. I wondered if it would recognize me.
I wondered if it mattered.
The Space Between Falling and Flight
People think flight is about the moment the wheels lift from the ground—the final break, the escape into open sky. But the Wright brothers knew better.
Flight isn’t about the takeoff.
It’s about the thousand failures before it.
They built, they tested, they failed. Then they rebuilt, tested again, and failed differently. Their first designs were clumsy, their machines crumbling under the weight of their own ambition. Too heavy. Too rigid. Too much resistance.
But failure wasn’t the end. It was the process.
They learned that wings must bend, not fight the wind. That lift isn’t about defying gravity, but working with it. That success isn’t about getting everything right the first time—it’s about refining the way you fail until failure turns into flight.
And wasn’t life the same way?
Letting Go of the Ground
I thought about the life I had left behind.
The choices I had treated as permanent. The things I had lost. The places I had called home until they weren’t anymore. I had spent so long trying to hold onto something that no longer existed, convinced that if I just replayed the past enough times, I could rewrite it.
But time doesn’t work that way.
And neither does flight.
The Wright brothers didn’t keep their planes tied to the ground, afraid of the fall. They let them go. They let them break, knowing they would fix them. They let them crash, knowing they would learn from it.
And I was still standing on the runway, waiting.
I exhaled, slow and steady.
Not the past.
Not the future.
Just this moment.
The flight attendant’s voice crackled over the speaker, calling for boarding. The woman with the paperback closed her book. The businessman pocketed his phone. The child pulled away from the window, leaving behind the ghost of his reflection in the glass.
I stood, slung my bag over my shoulder.
The world was still moving.
And this time, I was moving with it.
Lessons from the Sky
- You can’t move forward if you refuse to let go.
- Every failure contains the blueprint for flight.
- The sky only belongs to those willing to leave the ground.
I stepped toward the gate.
It was time to fly.
life 
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