freedom of flight

I used to have this trick when I was a kid. I’d sneak up on wasps and tie a thread around their middles and keep them as my own. They were like living kites, buzzing around my room.
We couldn’t have any other pets. My sister, Sharon, was allergic to what the doctors called “pet dander”. My mother told me it was the dead, flaky skin that dogs and cats scratch off of themselves, floating around the house, making Sharon sick. I hated the image her words worked in my mind, but still, I’d have liked a dog.
But I was stuck with wasps. Most of my friends were afraid of them, even when we got older. Once, when I was about six, my best friend Jeffrey came over after school to play. I introduced him to Walter the Wasp. Jeffrey screamed and ran out of the room. I chased him, holding Walter by his dental floss leash.
After a while, Jeffrey got used to Walter. We remained best friends, to this very day. It was Jeffrey, in fact, who turned me on to Budapest – a place where great art could happen.
In 1998 I went to Budapest to visit Jeffrey, who, like me, had recently graduated from Concordia College. Jeffrey immediately embarked on a trip around the world, didn’t even stop to take his gown off, while I went home to my folk’s place for the summer, which turned into winter, then spring and summer again. He only got as far as Western Europe, then Hungary. He called and told me how great everything was, “like Paris in the twenties for the nineties,” he said.
Since living in my old room at Mom and Dad’s house in White Bear Lake and working at Java Junction to stay hip wasn’t really cutting it, I got a passport, packed, and took off. He was right. Everything was different. There was a sense of expectation in the air, along with a certain depression. I thought both would be good for my art.
It must have been good, because I applied for an extended Visa and stayed.
I started getting connected and finding work, real work, as an artist.
May 7, 1998, a Tuesday afternoon, I was browsing online photos in a cybercafe. I was researching an airplane book I was contracted to illustrate, looking at everything from those rudimentary wings of Leonardo to balloons to rocket ships.
When Sophia walked in the world stopped. I felt like I was floating.
Her beauty is unconventional by anyone’s conventions. She has this gap in her teeth and her nose is misaligned; her left breast is bigger than the right, and her ears stick out but she carries herself like a person who knows some shit and takes no shit.
She sang that night, and it was like my head came detached from my neck and was tethered by the slightest string.
Afterward, we talked, and talking led to walking, and walking led to the next morning, when, always the romantics, we ate crepes and drank coffee together and the vertigo of her is still here, which is remarkable, because I used to keep my wild-flying heart on a tight leash.
Last week I sat in a chair, watching Sophia get ready for a show. She was naked and casual. She smelled like shampoo and soap and spices and, riding under it all, like herself, beautiful and earthy. Whenever I see her like this, I wax poetic because I feel like I could fly. She doesn’t understand it. She thinks I’m crazy. A wasp against tapped the window pane. I thought about my wasps, buzzing around on their leashes, walking them down the street, feeding them. Sometimes my sister Christina sneaked into my room and cut them free. I hated it when she did, but she always said she couldn’t stand to see things trapped, not even wasps.
Sophia caught me watching her. Her face became suddenly serious.
"Don’t you ever tire of me?" she was asking in her spice-laden English.
"For me getting’ too much yo’ love / be like trees getting too much sun, baby," I sang in falsetto. She grinned her crooked grin.
"Do I hold you down? Do you miss freedom?" She sat on the edge of the bed and I could smell the cloves clinging to her skin.
I thought about it, and about the stingerless stringered wasps.
I said, "How could I miss what I never had? You make me free in my liberty."
Then I tried to tell her about my wasps, tied by my own desperate hand and Christina's liberating scissors but I was crying and Sophia was holding my head to her chest and I was weightless again.