The sky view was always the best.
Up high, you were untouchable. Immortal, in a way. Sometimes the sky above you was gray and dead. Sometimes it was black, a deep darkness that seemed unending, only broken by flashes of starlight. But sometimes, every now and then, it was a soft blue, a cushion of feathery sky. Those were your favorite days.
The ground was always a patchwork, varying with the seasons. In the fall, it was a carnival coat, thousands of shades of colors. In winter, it was icy, crystallized, full of blues, whites, and silvers, sparkling like glitter. Early spring was much the same, but topped with dashes of green and pink, colors bringing back remembrance of summers forgotten for the holiday season.
But you could never stay in the sky.
Eventually, you had to keep falling, twisting down to the bottom, a balancing act of living and survival. The ground grew closer, and the sky shrunk, its infinity mixed with an impossibility that got further and further away.
A thrill always came from the fall--the feeling you got with the wind pushing against you, almost as if it were trying to keep you in the sky, the cutting cold of the air as gravity thrust you downward despite your every wish that it would just leave you alone, the approaching planet that filled you with a fear-induced adrenaline that you just couldn’t shake.
But it was never worth it.
Because you had to hit the ground.
You lie there, broken into tiny pieces like a puzzle someone had given up on and smashed into bits, panicking from the thoughts of abandon, wondering what would become of you if you ended up here forever, if you had no one to save you in the end, at your worst, when you couldn’t save yourself.
You begin to melt--the most sensitive parts of you disintegrating into a private puddle that you share with no one. You simply sit in your own misery, wishing someone could pull you out but knowing that, for now, you’re on your own. The pieces of you pull farther and farther apart, but you watch objectively, because, somehow, you just don’t care anymore.
The shards that were once you begin to drip, soaking into the ground, falling through into a cavernous echo of nothingness that lies beneath us all. They join with other broken pieces, gripping hands as they meld together into one, a solid heartbeat that manages to rise up and carry on, despite all the odds against it.
The pieces retain parts of each other forever, constantly together, as they come out of the cavern and back into the sun, which takes hold of them, squeezing them tightly in a death grip that is out of their control in an effort to bring them life again.
The sun pulls them farther and farther up, until somehow, they become you, and you are back in the sky and laughing with the parts of everyone else inside you as a reminder of what you have been and what you have become.
And the sky is beautiful.
But you must fall again, if only to get back up.
They may call you weak, or dumb. They may say you are a plane crash or an accident waiting to happen. They may know you as disasters or tragedies. They give you many names, too many to list. Only a few know the truth.
We are snowflakes. The water, and wind, and storm. We are free.
And yes, we can melt.
But we can also fly.