04.02.2026

In response to Esther’s writing prompt:

https://wp.me/p3vsTb-9i4

FLYING

Flying has many meanings.
Planes and passports.
Freedom and escape.
But for me, flying has always lived somewhere else — inside sleep, inside knowing.

Since I was young, I’ve had flying dreams. Lucid ones.
The kind where the body rests, but the self rises.

I remember one vividly.
I was seventeen.

My boyfriend had gone silent — the old kind of silent, back when we only had landlines and waiting could stretch for days. No texts. No explanations. Just absence.

I lay on my bed crying, staring at the ceiling, when something shifted.
The heaviness lifted.
And so did I.

I was flying — effortlessly — over a place I had never seen before. Streets unfamiliar, houses strange. Then I looked down and my chest tightened.

There was his car.
Parked outside a house.
And there he was, kissing another woman.

The moment snapped.
I dropped back into myself, awake and devastated, grief settling where wonder had been.

The next day, when he finally showed up, I asked him calmly who the other woman was.

He went pale.
Said there was no other woman.

So I told him what she looked like.
Where they were standing.
What I had seen.

He didn’t deny it then.

He just said, You are a witch, and told me he was breaking up with me.

I smiled — through the ache — and said, Good riddance.
And told him never to show his face in my presence again.

That was the day I learned something important about flying.

It isn’t always escape.
Sometimes it’s truth arriving early.
Sometimes it’s the soul refusing to be lied to.

And sometimes, flying is simply the courage to land —
and walk away.

— Maggie
The Afterlove Voice 💫