Creative Nonfiction
The Burning Sky
From the vantage point of the divine
The first time I thought about Icarus, I was twelve, sitting in a classroom that smelled like chalk dust and sour sweat.
Mrs. Gallagher stood at the front of the room, droning on about Greek mythology, eyes gleaming with that passion that made teachers utterly incomprehensible to their students.
But I wasn’t thinking about mythology.
I was thinking about what it would be like to fly.
Not in the way Icarus flew but in a more tangible sense: to break free of my life.
The humdrum reality of homework, nagging parents, and the gnawing sense I was just another kid in a sea of kids, destined to float through life through a series of standardized tests and compulsory sports, terrified me.
I imagined myself soaring above it all, above the mediocrity, like some kind of superhero, untethered from the gravity of smallness.
Icarus had wings.
I had my imagination.
But that’s the thing about fantasies — they always seem larger than life until you get close to them. Then, like the wax that melted beneath the sun, they fall apart.
Years later, after I’d graduated from high school and made it through college, I found myself in an office building, staring at a screen that reflected a version of myself I barely recognized.
I was an adult now, although I couldn’t tell you exactly when that happened. I spent my days drowning in endless emails and pointless phone calls, trapped within four beige walls, watching a houseplant slowly die on the windowsill. I didn’t know how I ended up there.
I wasn’t miserable, but I was numb, coasting through the hours with no real passion, no fire, just a dim sense that something was missing. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could put into words — more of a hollow feeling that echoed inside my chest when I lay awake at night. I was waiting for something, though I didn’t know what.
Then, one day, it happened.
I was sitting in that same beige office when an email pinged in my inbox: an invitation to go skydiving. It was from an old friend, Jake, who seemed to be living the life I had only dreamed of in my middle school fantasies.
He’d been traveling the world, chasing experiences like a moth to a flame, and now he was inviting me to join him in what felt like the ultimate test of courage. I hesitated.
Jumping out of a plane seemed reckless, the sort of thing people did when they had something to prove, or worse when they didn’t care what happened to them. I wasn’t one of those people — I was cautious and responsible.
I had a job.
I had rent to pay.
But that hollow feeling echoed again, and I realized that maybe I wasn’t living. Maybe the only way to discover what I was missing was to leap.
So, I said yes.
A week later, I found myself in a tiny plane, strapped to a man named Rick, who had the sort of confident grin you only see on people who’ve jumped out of planes for a living.
The air was thin and cold, and the ground below was a patchwork of green and brown fields that seemed impossibly far away. My heart was pounding in my chest, and despite the chill, I could feel the sweat trickling down my back.
“You ready?”
Rick shouted over the roar of the wind and the engine.
I wasn’t.
Not at all.
But I nodded anyway because what else could I do?
I was already up there.
I was committed.
The plane door slid open, and the wind hit me like a punch to the gut. Rick nudged me forward, and for a moment, I froze. The fear was overwhelming — my mind was racing with everything that could go wrong. What if the parachute didn’t open? What if we spiraled out of control?
What if I became another tragic statistic, another story that people shook their heads over? But then, almost as quickly as it came, the fear turned into something else: a strange, exhilarating sense of surrender.
I was powerless in that moment, completely at the mercy of gravity and the man strapped to my back. And for the first time in years, maybe ever, I felt free.
We jumped.
The first few seconds were chaos.
The wind screamed in my ears, the ground rushed toward me with terrifying speed, and my stomach dropped like I was on the world’s most violent roller coaster.
But then something shifted. The world seemed to slow down, and I could see everything — the fields, the sky, the distant horizon — laid out perfectly beneath me. And that’s when it hit me.
I wasn’t just falling.
I was flying.
Icarus wasn’t a cautionary tale; he was a metaphor. They didn’t punish him for flying too close to the sun — they punished him for failing to recognize that sometimes, you must risk the fall to experience the freedom of flight.
It wasn’t the sun that melted his wings but the fear of falling.
As I fell through the sky, I understood that Icarus’s mistake wasn’t ambition but doubt.
And maybe that’s what had been holding me back all these years, not the fear of failure, but the doubt that I deserved to rise above the ordinary, to break free from the gravity of my smallness.
The doubt that I could be more than just another kid in a sea of kids.
When the parachute finally opened, it felt like a second chance. The world stopped rushing, the chaos turned calm, and I floated gently down to earth, the wind carrying me like a whisper.
I landed on my feet, breathless but alive, and as Rick unclipped the harness, I couldn’t help but laugh.
Not out of relief but out of something deeper, something closer to joy.
For a brief moment, I had seen the world from the vantage point of the divine, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same.
“Not bad, right?”
Jake grinned as he clapped me on the shoulder.
“Not bad,” I agreed, though that didn’t begin to cover it.
Because for the first time, I wasn’t just imagining what it would be like to fly.
I had done it.
I had leaped, and I had soared.
And even though I was back on solid ground, I knew that part of me would always be up there, somewhere above the clouds, dancing with the sun.
And maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t so afraid of falling anymore.
Ani Eldritch 2024
