It could have been a bird I saw, a white bird, a cloud, a scrap of something floating in the wind. A dream, an illusion, a fata morgana. It could have been the moon itself, barely camouflaged by clouds, so that it took on the shape of a girl. The moon can easily take on the shape of a girl, given the right circumstances. Or could it have been the ghost of that girl abandoned on this mountain so many years ago, making her sweet sorrow known once again? If I were that girl, I wouldn’t be content with letting my tears speak for me, even if they spoke by splitting the earth. I’d come back again and again, to enact my revenge on lovers who weren’t the lovers they should have been.

In Marc Chagall’s The Birthday, Chagall is the floating man, lifted by his love for the wide-eyed woman, a doll-like depiction of his first wife, Bella Rosenfeld. She is running toward the open window, her face white, her expression unreadable. She still touches the ground as he contorts to kiss her. She has flowers in her hands. Her dress is black. Is she about to take flight as well? Why is she running? Is it a game? Will she escape? Will she survive?

Serena said you couldn’t levitate unless you had to. She was full of fictions in the end, but I don’t think this was one of them. Our bodies can issue imperatives. Anyone with a body knows this. There are stories of mothers performing superhuman feats, raising cars to save their children. There are stories of mysterious misfires, instant deaths. The human body is only a parcel of particles assembled in an uneasy alliance, hanging in tandem for a few years before they dissipate back into the universe. Their nature is to be separate. Chaos rules. We hold ourselves together by force, natural or otherwise. But all forces are inconstant. There’s no reason why any set of particles might not decide: rise.

This is how I’ve tried to straighten it in my mind, you see, to square a thing that cannot be squared, to put the round peg in, to reify the emptiness. I have piles and piles of pages on my desk: lists of rumors, eyewitness reports, science projects, photos, fairy tales. Things are falling apart. Things are bleeding together. On my desk and in my mind. The stitches I make don’t always hold, or they dissolve. The stitches I make spell out messages. If I were to tell you I made it all up, you would be forced to believe me.