They’re short.  I suppose a smaller bone structure makes it easier for them to fly.  They can let go of everything and simply soar above the sidewalk, their blonde hair skimming along behind them.

I can’t follow them into the air.  I’m not free, like they are.  There is too much weighing me down.  I need more than they do.  I need their friendship, their love, yet somehow, they don’t need mine.  I give to them what I have in the hopes that they will return it, and sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t.  When they take a running start and leap up into the sky, they don’t even give me a final look.

They aren’t like me.  They are like each other.  They are short with straight blonde hair, but those are only the outside similarities.  They seem to connect somehow, in a way that I don’t fully understand.  They will be with me, but I won’t be with them.  Their friendship extends to a higher level, a way of talking without words.  They only need one thing to get off the ground: each other.

We walk down Madison Avenue and they take off into the air.  They’re holding hands tightly, and it’s a strong bond, covalent, hard to break.  Yet they left me standing on the sidewalk, ripping apart the ionic bond that used to hold us three together, taking my generously donated electron into a place that I can’t reach.

But I don’t know for how long they’ll be able to stay up.  It’s a shaky flight.  If one of them falters, misses a step, the other one will come crashing down to land beside me, giving back my electron and plenty of theirs as well.  I haven’t moved an inch on that sidewalk.  I’ve just been waiting, waiting for them to come back.

And so I wait on, even now, wondering when they will return to me.

Yet someday I will learn to walk, and I will not wait anymore.  I will take your hand, and bond to you, sharing your generous electrons, and together we will take a running start and fly.  And perhaps if we meet them in the sky, we will make a solid compound that will never break again.