More Beautiful (than) Fiction

"You find a mixture of bounding perfection
You've gotta read but you don't want to reach the end
Cause what if everything beautiful's fiction?
And this reality's just pretend?"
Up, from the movie/Broadway show Sing Street


I took two books and sat outside on my patio reading. I had rearranged the patio earlier in the week to make it more spacious, tilting my kayak against the wall in one corner and admitting defeat about the plants which hadn't made it, throwing them out and lining the empty flower pots on a shelf for a more optimist day. I sat and read, but my eyes kept lifting from the page to the sky. Sunset was about half an hour away, and the sky was pale blue tinged with pink, laced with white clouds. It wasn't the type of startling beauty which may make you sigh, but was the kind which, when studied, can begin to hurt. Like the way you can love someone and it's the most wonderful and painful thing ever. Looking at the sky started to feel like that: the great endlessness of it, the constant changing of color, weather, light and dark, stars and lightning, all there in a continuous display of ordinary magic. Commonplace, or breathtaking, or a moment away from the kind of beauty which hurts.

I watched a couple of birds take off from a rooftop, when suddenly into my head popped a funny thought. I thought of how, in the story of Peter Pan, he tells the tale of how fairies came into existence because a baby's laugh split apart and scattered across the earth and became the first fairies. In that moment, I wanted to be a laugh which broke and scattered across the sky, floating and swooping and soaring around the city until it was all too wonderful to bear and I came back to land, whole, on my patio once more. Sound is an invisible force. As laughter, maybe I could make people smile by whispering past them on the air. A bemusing breeze. Just until sunset, then I'd return to my chair and my books, turn on the patio lights and watch as the sky grew dark. I may not be able to see many stars from the city, but I can watch the airplanes criss-cross through the sky, which I always find comforting. Beacons of passage, going and returning through all hours.

For a few minutes, the sun reflected in the glass of a tall building. As it sunk lower, the lacy clouds turned orange-pink, and the pale blue grew deeper. A bird swooped low past my patio. I guessed she was going to the nest above my kitchen window. I can't see it, but I can hear the baby birds chirping away as the mother comes and goes with food. Maybe instead of laughter, I can be the urgent chirping of a nest of baby birds; small, yet full-throated with new life.

The mother bird comes and goes. The airplanes come and go. I watch from my patio, taking note, turning thoughts into words into a story of flight and fancy. I hope to dream of flying, tonight. I hope to dream of bemusing breezes and the everyday show-off splendor of the sky. It's dark now, but there are lights on in apartments across the way from mine. There are other people on other patios having other strange and inspiring thoughts. Hello you. Did you see that sky, the opposite side as I did? Oh I know. Such beauty. The kind which, just a little, just for a minute if we actually stop and let it sink in, can hurt for a moment before it heals.