Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,30

middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.

I dreamed of flying over and over. In one dream in 1987 I fled a violent man on railroad tracks and then remembered that I could metamorphose and became an owl with a moth’s dusty wings. When the man lunged for me and grabbed my feet, I flew low over the water to drag him through it in the hopes of shaking him off. But mostly they weren’t violent dreams, just dreams of being alone, above it all, in the stratosphere, lonely and free. Perhaps being free of the weight of depression and expectation. Of the weight of a body. Of the weight of animosity.

The beauty of those places I soared over is with me still, and in all my dreams as in my waking life was a love of place, a sense that places were embodiments of emotions, were anchors, were companions of a sort, even protectors or parents. Once at the Pacific, I thought to myself Everything is my mother but my mother, and I recognized how the ocean had been a mother offering power, constancy, and solace. Many years later when I began rowing a scull, I realized that out in the water, I was out of reach of men and dogs, and that, as well as the beauties of water, made it serene, dreamy, the eighteen-foot span of my oars being as close to having wings as I could come.

But long before that, I flew. Even in the dreams my logical mind wrestled with how this was possible, anxious that it be possible. In one dream I had learned to align myself with the earth’s magnetic fields, in another I drew my strategy from a sentence I had read describing how the great dancer Nijinsky seemed to hover in the air a split second longer than gravity made possible, and I too was airborne for that kind of interval in a theater. I was in a world where levitation was normal but I tried to exceed the bounds and go higher. I tasted the cold of the upper stratosphere. Or I streamed across green landscapes.

Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.

I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams’ impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.

It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn’t think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.

I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.

Freely at Night

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One day in 2011, I got a Facebook friend request from someone I’d been in college with when I was seventeen and stayed in touch with for a few years after, someone I cherished then as a person I could trust and talk to, perhaps