“I guess Peter Pan was right,

Growing up’s a waste of time.

So I think I’ll fly away,

Set a course for brighter days.”

- Anson Seabra, “Peter Pan Was Right”

1

For as long as she could remember, she had never been grounded by gravity.

Her body was always light and she always walked with a spring in her step. She skipped up stairs and leapt from furniture to furniture in her house. She danced with the willows in summer and with the fallen leaves in autumn.

At night, when she closed her eyes in her bed, her body would turn as light as a gust of wind. She could feel the lightness spreading through her limbs down to the very tips of her fingers and toes. Then she would float upwards, through the covers and out of the open windows.

She could fly.

She felt the wind blowing past her. She rode atop it, turned and dove through it effortlessly; she could go anywhere she wanted with merely a thought. She flew only at night, when no one would be able to see her.

Flying made her happy. The wind blew away all her worries during the flight. When she was feeling sad at the end of a day, all she had to do was lie down on her bed, close her eyes, and let the wind take away her troubles. She would return to her bed with a lightened heart and go to sleep smiling.

Once, she had an argument with her parents in the day. Unable to stand it, she had gone to her room and taken flight. She flew out of her window and over the road behind her house. Cars sped by beneath her, and their headlights formed a river of light under the late-evening sky. She soared over the traffic like a shadow, and no one noticed her passing through the sky.

The cool evening wind blew at her as she flew down the road. Her anger and frustration cooled down. She began to feel bad for the argument. I should go back, she thought, or they’ll start to worry. She flew back to her room and found her parents waiting there. They hugged each other tightly and the argument was forgotten.

Flying made her happy and healed her heart.

2

When she was nine, she asked her grandmother why she could fly.

“It’s because you have a heart as light as a feather, my dear girl,” said her grandmother.

That’s not true, she thought as she lay in bed that night. My heart is heavy sometimes, and flying makes it light again.

Many things could make her heart heavy. School, for one. She got upset when she received low scores on tests. She got frustrated when another boy in class kept bothering her when she was studying. She got scared when their teacher yelled at them for bad behavior and slipping grades. These emotions weighed down on her. At the end of these days, she would go and take a lengthy flight until the weight was lifted from her heart.

Her grandmother passed away when she was ten. That night, she floated out of her window and settled into a tree.

Her parents had gotten divorced earlier that year. She’d chosen to stay with her mother, who grieved for her grandmother also.

She stayed in that tree for a long time, longer than she had ever spent on flying, until she had let all her tears fall, until her heart didn’t feel heavy again, though it didn’t feel light, either. Just slightly empty.

3

She would be graduating from primary school soon.

Grades were important, her teachers said. You need good grades to go to a good secondary school.

Mastery of the content is equally important, they said. You need to know all of this, or you wouldn’t be able to keep up.

She took an admissions test and got accepted to a secondary school. Later, she took another admissions test for the secondary school she wanted to go to. Her mother paid one thousand to secure her place at the first school, because they weren’t certain that she would get accepted to the second school. It turns out that she did get accepted by the school she wanted to go to.

A lot of other things were making her heart heavy now. Her childhood friend was going to live in another country, and they wouldn’t be seeing each other for an indefinite amount of time. She wasn’t making a lot of new friends at her new school. Everyone seemed to have their own friend, but she didn’t. Whenever she tried to make new friends, her attempts seemed impossibly awkward.

Academic workloads had increased. She sometimes stayed up to ten to finish her homework, pushing back her bedtime for an hour. She had more subjects to study, more projects, more essays.

She still flew regularly. When the stress became too much, or when she was feeling particularly sad, she would open her window and float out of her room into the soothing winds. And then, blissfully, the stress and sadness would be carried away by the wind, and she returned to her room with a lighter heart.

4

She sometimes thought about what her grandmother had meant when she said that she had a heart as light as a feather.

Her heart had felt perpetually light when she was small. Those days, before her grandmother passed away and her parents got divorced and she moved on to secondary school, those days she had been happy and carefree. Her life felt like a myriad of colors, light shades of sunny yellow and clearest blue and cooler shades of forest green and comforting lilac, all shining, swirling around in her memory like so many bubbles.

As she grew up, things started to weigh on her heart. Troubles and anxieties reached up from the ground, touched on her heart, and tried to keep her on the ground. Still, it only ever took her a flight to escape the holds. Flying kept her heart light.

A light heart, she thought, was not the thing keeping her in flight, for surely it was the other way round.

5

She progressed into ninth grade.

People all around her were trying out different things, joining different clubs, winning medals in different competitions. You’re entering high school, everyone seemed to say to her, time to find a path for yourself and start putting together an activity list.

She stood petrified in the middle of it all. Nothing interested her. She did not like public speaking. She did not like debate. She was not particularly interested in STEM. None of the clubs felt meaningful to her.

She had new, more demanding classes. Even her classmates terrified her a bit: they were bold, confident, accomplished, all of them. The work was harder and took more time, forcing her to stay up later, sometimes to twelve. Her desk became cluttered with packets and papers and assignments that just kept on accumulating, like the way her heart felt heavier with each passing day.

On a warm night in May, she lifted her head from a mountain of schoolwork and looked at the time. It was twelve. She rubbed her eyes and slowly gathered her assignments. She dropped her pens back into her pencil bag. She put her assignments and textbooks into her bag. She shoved her pencil bag into her bag.

She eyed her backpack. It was crammed to the brim, bursting apart at the seams, and, she knew, would be a pain to carry on her back tomorrow.

Tomorrow…

Tomorrow she had three monthlies. Three monthlies and a presentation.

The air in the room was stifling. She reached over and threw open the window, breathing in the breezy night air that wafted inside. Her hands gripped the windowsill. She closed her eyes and burst out of the window.

She hadn’t flown for what must have been at least four months. She didn’t know why. Somehow, the idea just stopped crossing her mind.

Now she flew high. She soared and dipped through the wind, spreading her hands and feeling the breeze flowing in between her fingertips. The moon was full and silver overhead tonight, bathing her with its pearly rays. She flew straight ahead without looking back: past the trees growing around her house, over the few late cars strolling down the road with headlights sparkling, all the while feeling the wind on her face. Her heart suddenly felt so light, lighter than it had been in months, so light that it might burst, and a wide smile appeared on her face.

Eventually she came to a stop. She hovered in midair, thinking about how long she had flown, how far she was from home. Thin tendrils of cloud passed over the moon. She thought of tomorrow. Three monthlies and a presentation. She felt a sinking feeling in her stomach.

Guess I’d better go back, she thought with a sigh.

6

Tonight, she had already finished her schoolwork and, tiredly, put her things back into her schoolbag. She closed her eyes. Nothing happened. She took a deep breath and tried again. Slowly, she floated up and out of the window.

The night wind greeted her, cool and soothing as ever. The moon was bright and seemed to be singing to her. But there was something different. Her limbs felt as heavy as lead, and the wind could not seem to bear her weight. Her heart sank.

A few moments later, her body started to sink, too. It sank slowly. She fought and struggled against the falling motion, held out her arms and tried to will herself skyward again, but it was no use: she kept sinking, gliding down almost as if she was tied to the end of a parachute. She felt a sense of rising panic as she fell below her window, then past the tops of the trees around her house. Finally, her feet touched the ground.

Gravity, it seems, has finally gotten its hold on her.

As she stood there, feeling a growing sense of despair at the loss of her flight, at the crushing weight on her heart, at the schoolbag lying upstairs crammed with textbooks and essays and her desk overflowing with paper, she could only muster one thought:

My heart is no longer light as a feather.

7

She never flew again after that. She couldn’t anymore.

Somewhere in the journey of her growth, certain things had sneaked up from the ground and wound their grip tightly around her heart without her noticing. Those things could have a lot of names – anxiety, stress, pressure, you name it. Things that were simply too heavy to be able to be lifted by a single flight, or even multiple flights. It took a lifetime’s work to learn to deal with these things. They grew on her heart until it became weighed down with troubles, too heavy to support her flight.

But then again, it never was a light heart that enabled her to fly. Not exactly. Some years later, when she was well out of school and into society, she could look back upon her childhood, and it was then that she realized what her grandmother had meant. When she was young and her troubles were small, relief was only ever one flight away. She enjoyed flying because it made her happy. It was the lifting of her troubles. But when she grew up, when her troubles became too much to be dealt with by one flight, it ceased to make her happy. That was when gravity and all those other things gained a hold on her and tethered her on the ground. That was when she stopped flying, because it became increasingly harder for her to escape from her troubles. She stopped flying because she didn’t have the strength and ability to deal with the troubles she faced anymore.