Story 3

What a wonderful feeling it is to be in love. Can't be bothered with proper post today, sorry (taekwondo tonight is making me feel a particularly special kind of dead). You'll have to put up with the next part of the story, I'm afraid beggers can't be choosers in this business. I will say one thing though and it is this: it is getting fucking odder and odder with the people coming up to me and telling me about my blog. More people do it now, they just come up to me in college telling me about my blog, what they think of it etc. One guy even apologised to me for having not read the latest entry yet! Don't stop guys, (I like having fans, despite how few they are in number) it's just fucking WEIRD. Here is the story:

Three: Flying

I wondered how Ella would be able to fly. I believed her though, if she said she could do something, I believed she could do it. Anything seemed possible for her. She gave me another brief smile and closed her eyes, taking in a slow breath as she did so. As she slowly let it out again through her lips, I felt the air moving gently upwards against my hands. We lifted up from the ground, slowly at first but gradually increasing in pace. By the time we were level with the top of the cliff, the air was rushing past our bodies. We were still holding hands, and to my surprise she twirled me around mid-flight. I realised I was laughing and when Ella saw this she started laughing too. I hadn’t felt this happy for ages; usually I wasn’t even happy at all. She took me higher still and the little alcove with the waves splashing against it just kept getting smaller and smaller. That’s one thing I remember very clearly about flying; how small everything looks. The air rushing against us was fantastically refreshing and I suddenly felt very light. It was intoxicating, this flying business. I would have to do it more often.

Ella took me soaring in a big circle over the tops of the cliffs and gently brought me back down to earth again. She looked at me expectantly, but I could only manage one word. “...Wow.” She smiled at my reaction and asked if I would like to learn how to fly. I immediately said yes, of course I would. What I had just done was extremely unnerving, but I wanted more than anything to do it again and again. Ella inclined her head briefly and walked up to stand next to me. She closed her eyes and placed her hands by her sides, so that the palms were facing downwards towards the sand. I felt a breeze move upwards alongside her, and the sand started to kick up around her bare feet. She rose up a few inches and stayed there, hovering. I stared, open-mouthed. She laughed; it sounded like a dawn chorus of birds in the spring.

Ella had always said there wasn’t anything particularly hard about flying. For me, who had just seen something that seemed impossible beforehand, this was very hard to believe. She told me that all I had to do was feel the air around me; it was as simple as that. I copied what she had just done, with my eyes closed and my hands facing the ground. I waited for a short while, but nothing happened. I opened my eyes to see Ella looking at me with curiosity. I told her I couldn’t do it, but she just frowned. She said that to feel the air I first had to know the air. She had a look of contemplation on her face and it seemed she was having difficulty explaining to me what I had to do. I guess she didn’t teach people how to fly every day. All of a sudden I wanted to fly not just for me, but for her too. I took her hand and gave her a shy smile to encourage her. She looked at me and her blue eyes were filled with brightness, as if they were charged with electricity.

She squeezed my hand in hers and repeated what we had done before, when I flew for the first time. This time she did everything slower; I guess she wanted to emphasise what she was doing. I felt the by now familiar breeze rise up around my feet, then around my hands and finally brushing against my face. The air seemed to mirror Ella in that it was also moving slower than last time. I noticed something else that felt very different from before, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint it. It was as if I could feel the curves of the air flowing around my body. Ella moved my hand slightly to the right so that it was closer to her body, and something very strange happened. I suddenly realised exactly what Ella had meant. She must have moved my hand directly into the source of the air currents, because the shapes of the curves felt a lot more distinct. I could feel what felt like the individual air molecules moving past and over my hand in little streams and eddies. I never really questioned this; it just sort of seemed to make sense to me. The air could be manipulated on a large scale, why shouldn’t it be manipulated on a tiny scale too? I looked at Ella at this point, and she seemed to know what I was thinking. “Yes Alex, those are molecules of air that you can feel,” she said with a wry smile. “Now you know the air.”

Ella began to speed up the flow of air and soon we were floating upwards, supported on cushions of molecules she so easily moved to her will. We were a couple of feet from the ground when she asked me to see if I could now ‘feel the air’. I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath and slowly let it out, allowing all my muscles to relax. I felt the breeze on my hands and sure enough, I could now recognise a faint flow of molecules, appearing to me as a regular pulse. I struggled to manipulate them however, but after several tries I managed to push some of them away and pull some of them back. To manage this I moved my hand towards them and away again, but I had to do this within the stream of molecules. That was the knack to the manipulating bit. Once you have the right rhythm and speed, you can do anything. Ella seemed to notice that I was having some success and she looked on me with a bemused expression. All of a sudden she let me go. I was taken completely by surprise, but just before I hit the ground, I stopped moving. I was hovering, literally only about an inch above the sand. I looked up at Ella, but she simply shook her head and grinned at me. Somehow I had managed to instinctively manipulate the air below me just in time. I flew back up to Ella with ease, to my complete surprise. She looked very pleased with herself and said “Now you can fly, Alex.”