Fengzheng

In ancient China during the Qingming Festival, people visited the graves of their ancestors. They swept the tombs and pulled the weeds and laid out food and burned ghost money so the dead would have what they needed in the afterlife. And then they flew kites. But before they flew them they wrote things down on pieces of paper. Their ailments. The people they had lost. The things that kept them awake at night. They tied the paper to the kite and flew it as high as it would go and when the string was taut and the kite was just a shape against the sky they cut it. They let it go. They believed the kite would carry all of it away from them and into something bigger than they were.

For years I lived inside other people’s expectations. Do this. Do that. No not like that. Why did you do it that way. I didn’t tell you to do it that way. Stop. Don’t stop. Change direction. No that’s the wrong direction. Are you listening to me. Can you not think for yourself. I told you what to do. Why are you doing it wrong. Why can you not get it right. So many people and so many words and all of them landing on me at once and I am sitting at my desk sixteen hours a day absorbing every single one of them and I cannot make my brain shut off. I cannot make the voices stop even after the screen goes dark and the house is quiet because my head is still replaying every sentence trying to figure out which ones I got wrong and what I should have said and what I will say tomorrow and none of it matters because tomorrow it starts again. But I was disappearing. I could feel it happening the way you feel a word you used to know slipping out of reach. I was losing myself. I did lose myself. I lost years to a version of my life that looked like living from the outside and felt like nothing from the inside.

And what was I doing. What was any of it for. I was living someone else’s version of my life and I did not even know it. I let people tell me who I was and I believed them. I took their labels and I wore them and I altered myself to fit the outline they had already decided I should be. I sacrificed my peace for it. I let relationships slide for it. I poured myself into work that truly did not matter and I told myself it did because the alternative was admitting I had given everything to nothing. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking about things that made me feel alive. I stopped being me. I put every dream I had on hold and I did not even call it that. I just called it later. Later I will write. Later I will run. Later I will love someone. Later I will be ready. And later kept going and going and going until it was not later anymore it was just my life.

So I go back. I am six years old on a beach in northern Michigan and the wind is the first thing I feel. It is always the first thing I feel. It is warm and I let it wash over me and it fills my lungs and makes me breathe deep and I am alive. In my childhood everything is muffled. I have spent my whole life trying to explain to people the way my brain works and I have never once gotten it right. I do not process sound the way other people seem to. My brain picks one sound and locks onto it and holds it there and turns it over and over and the rest fades until it is almost nothing like someone turned the volume down on the whole world. On this beach it is the water. The water pulling itself in and holding and holding and then letting go against the rocks and the sand and the shoreline. The children shrieking and the adults laughing and the dogs barking are there but I have already let them go and I cannot hear them anymore. I lie down in the sand and I can feel every pebble and every shell pressing into my back and the coolness of it envelops me. I look up and the sky is wide and pale blue and the clouds are thin and soft and layered across the sky and the light is breaking through them everywhere and I know they are cirrostratus because I have memorized every type of cloud there is. And then I see the kites. I count them first. The way I count everything first. Then I sort them by color, lightest to darkest, precisely how the crayons line up in the sixty-four pack. Dandelion. Carnation Pink. Cerulean. Cornflower. Sea Green. Green Blue. I am lying on a beach and my brain is doing exactly what it wants to do and no one is telling me to stop and I belong here and I do not know yet that I will spend decades looking for this feeling in all the wrong places.

A kite flies because of the difference in air pressure above and below it. The air moving over the top moves faster than the air underneath. The faster air creates lower pressure. The slower air creates higher pressure. The kite is pushed upward. It is the same science that makes an airplane fly. Four forces act on a kite at all times. Lift, weight, drag, and tension. For a kite to stay in the air all four must be in balance. If any one of them shifts the kite moves. If the wind increases the lift increases and the kite climbs. If the tension disappears the kite falls. A kite needs its string to fly. Without it the kite would move with the wind and there would be no difference in air speed above and below it. The lift would drop to zero and it would fall. The thing that holds it back is the thing that keeps it in the air. One day the string just snapped. And I fell. I fell for a long time. I sat inside my own silence and I did not try to fix anything. I did not do what I have always done which is to get up immediately and find something to grab onto and make myself useful and make myself needed and make myself so busy that I do not have to feel anything. I just sat with it. All of it. The grief I had been outrunning and the life I had been performing and the person I had stopped being somewhere along the way. I sat with it the way you sit on the floor at three in the morning when you have finally stopped pretending you are okay and and your bones know it and you are too tired to lie to yourself anymore. Letting every single thing I had been holding at a distance come close enough to touch me and it did and it hurt and I stayed anyway.

I started running. I do not know what made me do it except that I had forgotten what it felt like to be inside my own body and I needed to find out if I was still there. I ran hard and long and fast and I ran every single day and when you are running that hard the world goes silent. It does the same thing my brain did on that beach when I was six. Everything falls away. The voices and the expectations and the labels and the lies all of it just goes somewhere I cannot reach and it is just me and my lungs and my feet hitting the ground and the sound of my own breathing and nothing else. I let go of the version of myself I had been carrying around for years. The one other people built. The one I agreed to. I threw away every single lie I had ever been told about who I was and what I was capable of and what I deserved and somewhere in the middle of all that running something settled. Like my whole body exhaled for the first time and did not tense back up. I stopped answering to names that were not my name. I let go of what had never belonged to me. I let it all fall away and I was still standing. I remembered the girl on the beach who sorted kites by color and knew the names of clouds and invented whole worlds while lying in the sand because she believed everything was possible and I thought she is still in there. She has been in there this whole time.

The earliest kites were shaped like birds. They were made of bamboo and silk and built to imitate flight before humans understood the physics of it. Sometimes finding your way costs you everything that was never actually important and it is only after it is gone that you understand you have been suffocating under the weight of a life you did not even want. I do not have an ending to this because I am not at one. I am somewhere in the middle of something I do not have a word for yet. I run tomorrow morning and the wind will hit my face and my brain will go quiet the way it does. I will look up and name the clouds because I have always named the clouds. The kite is in the air. The string is in my hands. And maybe the whole point was never about letting go. Maybe it was about learning to stand in the open with nothing in my hands and not be afraid of it.

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