It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

When I was three years old, I tied a blanket around my neck and sat at the top of the stairs for two hours, contemplating the drop. It didn't look too terribly bad, and I knew very little - if not nothing - about momentum and physics at the time.

All I knew was that Superman and Batman could do it. I hadn't discovered the distinction between their worlds and mine yet; I hadn't discovered that they possessed gifts that no one else did. I hadn't discovered that their worlds contained possibilities ours didn't.

I hadn't realized that they were more special than I.

The carpet on the stairs was not-quite sky blue; it was a little darker than that, a little more grey. I thought about Superman, flying through stormy, dense clouds, dodging lightning bolts . I thought about Batman, leering over a building at some faceless villain, his shoulders and cowl blending into the night sky behind him. At the bottom of the stairs lay an expanse of hard, neat white tile, sterile and uncracked and uniform like a cotton ball cloud on a summer's day.

I stood up and puffed out my chest, tightening the blanket around my neck and standing at the very edge of the top step, so close to wobbling off that I curled my toes around its lip as a bat would in order to to cling to a tree branch. I grasped the rail nailed so neatly into the wall and jumped.

When I woke up, I was still lying on the tile, my mother hovering over me with a look of panic. All I could remember was the way that first, blue stair looked when it made contact with my face. Its softness seemed magnified - ironically, of course, because in actuality it was almost as hard as the tile.

Somehow, I had always imagined the sky to be softer. 

Not quite like the wind.

It smelled like rain the day I stopped running.

It's been years since then - getting close to ten, actually - but, sometimes, when it's overcast and humid and everything smells just a little earthier, just a little more like the worms are waking up and poking their heads out of the ground, I remember it.

The Seamstress and I were staying at a resort with her parents during one of their extravagant yearly psychology conventions; the kind where we ate from a barbeque buffet each meal and smuggled desserts back to our room, where we read manga and played handheld games and watched too many direct-to-order movies. We'd grown tired of the swimming pool and the television and the poorly-furnished arcade and were quickly growing restless in our suite. One of us - I can't remember who - suggested a day trip to Hershey Park in order to get away from the muted, meticulously decorated room; near-obscene garishness was the break we craved, and we begged for it for days.

Her parents caved towards the end of the week. We loaded into the car with cash for food and plugged our ears with music while the Gameboys that shook in our hands emitted tiny, digitized blip-bink-bop tunes. It was sunny when we left, but the day had turned grey and moist by the time we arrived; we pulled umbrellas from the trunk and carried them under our arms and spoke in faux-British accents while we twisted fake mustaches. 

We stood before the giant, swinging pirate ship as it swung from one extreme to another. 

"This one is my favorite," I told the Seamstress, craning my neck and following the ride's ebbing motion with an outstretched finger. "It gives you that funny 'woosh!' feeling in your stomach." We elbowed each other as it came to a stop and quickly piled into the farthest left seat, so as to reach the maximum possible height the ride would allow. 

My hair was long then, pulled back with a little elastic band. I remember two, maybe three drops of rain hit me in the face as we rocked back and forth; I worried they would stop the ride, worried they would close the park, but no such decision was made. Ecstatic, I hopped off the boat and we made a dash to get back in line. The Seamstress, always a few steps ahead of me, leaped off of the ride's steel platform to the pavement beneath us; I followed suit.

I didn't realize what had happened until I stood to walk again; my right foot gave out beneath me, and I was back on the pavement where I'd started, and, behind me, a small divot in the pavement marked where I had landed unevenly the first time. I tried again, and suddenly it felt like a million little pins had wiggled their way under my skin, under the muscle, to a terrifying place where nothing could get them out. I tried again and again; I tried until the Seamstress plucked me off the ground and carried me to a bench where her parents gave me suspicious-yet-sympathetic looks and urged me to try walking again.

The medical transportation vehicle made annoying whirring-wooping noises as it bounced around on the gravel and cement below; the car on the way to the hospital did the same - sans the siren - and every jolt and jar agitated me more. By the time I was x-rayed, my ankle was black and swollen to seven times its normal size.

Nothing was broken, but no one ever figured out what exactly was wrong; I was placed on crutches for two days and in a walking splint for two weeks, after which the doctors told me I was fine. 

Only, I couldn't run anymore.