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.