Early morning routine. Sleep in, miss the sunrise. Chopped apples, the 6:40 bus.

We stop at the train tracks. The bus is quiet, but the music is loud—and not for being loud but for being there. The driver turns his head, looks down the tracks. I follow his lead and the music swells. I know the chords, but I don’t know the words. We’re just standing still, and I look up. The sun hovers over the mountains, washing them in atmospheric watercolor light, turning rocks to paper.

Suddenly I’m a newborn sixteen-year-old girl again. Fragile. Joy is new to me, and I’m still fighting off the monsters I sit with every day. A warm light, the color of coffee constantly pulls me further from them, and the sky is waiting for me, but I don’t know it—not yet. Everything is at the beginning, and I feel tangibly young again. Every pain, every laugh, every fascination is new and unyielding.

We start moving again, and a tiny white butterfly flutters just two feet away from me but I can’t reach it. He goes forward and then we follow, dancing with wings of music. And in fragments, I take flight.

…

Again.

A sweet harmony floods my senses, freezing me on the spot. My eyes unfocus and I’m a snowy November day. My memory is a parallax, shifting colors as I run toward tomorrows. The drifts were up past my knees, but I ran through them anyway. The world was a flurry of white and I was all too eager to find myself lost in it. I’d stayed too long at a table surrounded by books and rushed back for lunch as fast as I could.

I shed layer after layer when I stumbled into the building, tracking snow everywhere. The music was in my hands, and I played a new favorite song of mine. Whether I played it for me or for him depends on perspective, but when he danced, he shone even brighter.

His feathers matched the lyrics we sang a little too loudly, and every time the chorus hits, my heart skips a beat. It’s a rope pulling me back to the present, but it’s not strong enough because, like a bird in the air, I’m falling again.

And with butterfly wings, I take flight.

It’s the bus, maybe. That feeling of always moving, but you’re not really in charge. Location: unknown. Who knows where I’ll stop next. Maybe that’s why the music can take me away so quickly, because I’m already drifting. In transit, I’m somewhere in between now and then. I could disappear, and I would just be frozen in time. If it’s all just a waiting game, it’s no wonder I’m so easily pulled away.

With feathers of my own, I take flight.