Our first steps

The theory of evolution holds that somewhere around 4 million or so years ago we moved down from the trees and took our first steps. Though this current of thought is currently the orthodox view those of us who were there are aware of the mistake.

We were living among the clouds in those days. People were lighter back then as our lineage was still closer to that of the angels. The proximity lead to some liaisons as proximity is want to do. Occasionally, though you'd hear of it only as rumor, a love affair would start between one of us and one of the large birds that would soar past us on their way down south. Though these sorts of affairs were mere rumors we all knew them to be true. This was verifiable if you paid close enough attention to the offspring, who's bones were half-hollow and who occasionally would, mid-conversation, if the wind kicked up, begin to float away and have to ask you to hold onto a part of their leg while they finished describing what had happened during their day. And so you clutched on tightly to a calf and watched them spin yarns. Also, occasionally, if you hung around them long enough, they'd emit, without prompting, a loud caw. Or if they were one of the interesting ones they'd break into song, and then stop just as abruptly, peeling off embarrassed, while you just wanted to cup your chin in your hands and listen to them all afternoon.

I fell in love with a girl like this when I was fourteen. She had long golden hair like sheafs of sunlight hanging on the bottom of clouds. I loved her tenderly, and we had conversations that went something like this: I'd say: this morning I was running around at sunrise. I could feel the light in my hair, making particular strands of hair feel warm.

And she'd say something like: in the winter, I'll fly away.

This is all interpretive you understand as we hadn't yet invented proper language with all of the nuances to describe the way that we were living. For instance, she might have been saying: I'm going to drop down from this cloud and walk down a field clothed in snow. Or she could have been saying: the impossibility of flight is one of the saddest things in an otherwise only relatively sad world. Or maybe: it's cold. I don't miss you.

Sometimes, we'd lie on the top of the clouds, which are soft as you can probably imagine, and we'd run our hands through each other's hair and wait for the silver light of the moon. In those moments, we wouldn't talk at all. Though sometimes she'd inadvertently break into song. The songs  were saying something about the way that flowers tilt towards the light and how worms are very useful creatures but kind of slimy and not all that much to look at when you really got down to it. Or she was singing about someone she'd loved in a previous life, a doctor who moved down from the clouds and onto the land and lived by himself in a large dwelling where he read books and threw stones at anyone who approached.

You would think, given the time we'd been allotted in the clouds that our love would keep growing day by day, and I thought that it was to tell you the truth. For a while, we didn't talk. The clouds in the distance where other people lived were tinged red by the setting sun. You can see where people eventually got the idea for a thing like porphry. Like most interesting ideas, it didn't come from the ground, but from the sky.

We were sitting, on one of those lonely and lazy afternoons when she asked if I wanted to see something. She was excited, and maybe she'd said that I had to see something, or wanted to know if she had done something worth seeing, but she got up, and stood at the edge of the clouds with her arms extended. I warned her to not stand so close to the edge. We routinely lost people in just this way. She turned around and smiled back at me and asked if I remembered that day that she sang about the doctor who'd gone to live on the ground. I think. And then she let the wind take her, arms extended she soared out and away from the clouds like a bird.

I was certain that she'd eventually fall to her death, or come back. Instead she made a series of slow looping circles, moving closer and closer, to the ground. I saw her sailing above the tree tops and then arcing out over a savanna, the grasses swaying in a gentle breeze. I couldn't see that far down of course, she was a mere speck by then. And all the time, until I saw, or thought I saw her feet touch the ground, I kept thinking that she'd come back to me. That somehow or some way the wind would carry her back up into the clouds where we'd live together forever. That was the first of nine women that I loved, all of whom, in their own way, remade the world.