I don’t have enough chances to pretend I’m flying anymore.

Only in little winks of leaning against an invisible wall that holds me to its bounds, closing in the outside world; only in seeing the bend in the loop of train tracks before it ripples through my feet do I remember the tingling fear of going flying over the top of the swing if my weight pumped rubber and rusted metal chain into enough motion—  
    
How do you tell a mother that her father is dying? What do you say as she cries at the wheel while your own hands are clasped tightly in your lap, as if holding the circuit to life in your fingers? How do you tell her if I could connect this loop forever, I would, but how can you know how long it wishes to hold on when the passing of a current is few and far between and a spark hurts at the memory? How can you know when a memory decides to stop spinning? How do you fit that in “I love you”?

The 7 train is undependable. Often it slows to a crawl, grinds to stop where it sits atop a track, waiting: elevated train suspended in sky, the tops of buildings so vividly tangible, haze interspersing cloud, except—the faint reflection of myself jarring the dream, tesseract rippling. I hold me back, the flash of my face a reminder of a mirror that is not two-way, memory of a swing in the lull of sky, buildings, ground. Pump, spin: sky, ground, sky, ground—

A paradox: childhood is not machinery. It does not churn out a product or crunch numbers. Yet it is all charged air, hum, no power off. I don’t realize this until the current that once tingled through my body in the smell of smoky-night-with-flickering-lights is somehow only a phantom memory that creeps into my veins but leaves by the second exhale.

How do you tell a family to give up? How do you tell them, as the clock ticks towards midnight, that this is the end? That flight has been slowly forgetting itself for some time now, and is it better for a fading end to quicken or slow? Is it better to know or to keep hanging onto mist evaporating in hope of condensation? How can you tell—when you journey down the familiar tracks, lights glowing by the side—that this will be the last time you make this ride? That the lobby of the hospital with its elevator music playing will reach the end of its memory? That it will be gone before you've had a chance to muse?

Apartment lights like a patchwork quilt blink, lost on a train going someplace in the night. Somewhere along the way, spark should yield light. The circuitry should close, the current must loop, but there are things that can never be recovered: a MetroCard my room ate, raindrops, my grandfather’s memory—like the feeling of being a child: awe, fear and firstness. The first wondering of what it would be like to be lost outside the glass in smoky evening—all mystery and scent of burnt air and night, reflectionless: pathway through the tesseract. The first wondering of climbing up the supporters of bridges, elevated tracks—cool metal against fingertips. The fading remembrance of jungle gyms and seesaws frozen in seven years old, becoming more of a dream as time passes. Maybe that’s what it’s like to forget: losing the mirror-boundary of glass between dream and experience, between haze and cloud.

How does a body tell itself slow to stop in its tracks? When does it decide that keeping a circuit board functioning is more than it can manage? How does a body lose its spark; how does it ration its last reserves to hum dimly but not past the threshold of awareness?  Does it know when it will run out, let go and fly off the swing, shatter the bounds of an invisible wall? Three hours to clear out the room after one passes, they tell you. Out of the drawers comes a childhood toy: a twisty, segmented rainbow loop that young or memoried hands can shape.

The little boy swings around a subway pole, little hands and legs wrapped around it.  His voice squeals through silence as he twirls around to face in my direction; I look up and smile at him and he smiles back, I think. Or he just smiles, because children smile. His bright eyes take in everything: old men and young punks, reminiscence in the tracks, cloud swaying against tree; he glances out the looking glass to life rising and setting as the sun. The child points, leaning against the pole, stretching his arms out for a second like he's flying.