It’s always heartbreaking when something like this happens. Something ages, grows old, and it can never go back the way it was before. It’s lost, forgotten.

Isolated.

A mere leaf blown away.

An imprisoned bird, it’s space too small for its wingspan, its feathers catch and fall from the bars of the iron cage, it’s beady dark eyes peering into the clear space beyond them. It’s always worse when you can see what you are longing for right before you, your wish within your sight, with no possible way to get it. A bird needs to be free to stretch, to soar through the crisp morning. It needs to feel the water splatter against its feathers as it looks out into the rain. It needs to sing a melody out in the air proudly for anyone to hear them. It needs to sit on the scratchy bough as the breeze rustles the leaves on the trees. Sometimes the wind blows too strong and a leaf falls.

He is the bird.

He would sit by the window in the old library, on the top floor and right at the back, in the early morning with a book on Lepidoptera rested in his lap. He would not be reading the book, no, but he would be staring out the window in a daydream. Looking at the clouds.

My name is Sehun.

I am the leaf.

I checked my watch, half past eight. I spread my fingers over the material bindings, softer than they had been, their pages yellowing at the edges. I traced them as I walked by slowly, through the maze of oak shelves until I reached the end. The light from the window shone white and cold onto the wooden floor, the dust particles swirled and danced visibly in its pale beams. The pleasant smell of stale books surrounding me, filling me with anxiety and butterflies. I peered round-

No one.

An empty window seat, indented from its hundreds of years of use. Strangely unoccupied.

I walked over and ran my hand over it, the red material was bristly with age too, a beautiful bird of paradise embroidered into it in the colours of a flame, now faded considerably. Something creaked behind me, and my butterflies returned. I turned around and saw him standing there. A clock chimed from elsewhere, echoing through the books and the dust.

He gazed at me, and handed me a book he was holding. He was holding two.

His finger was keeping a page.

In ancient Egyptian mythology and in myths derived from it, the phoenix or phœnix (pheonix, phoenixbyrd, feonix, foenix) is a mythical sacred firebird.

Said to live for 500 or 1461 years, the phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises. The new phoenix embalms the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposits it in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis (“the city of the sun” in Greek).

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” he said into the silence, “if this library could do that.”

I looked up at him.

“Burst into beautiful flames and renew itself. Imagine wiping away the soot and ash and finding the same book as before, but clear with blinding white flat pages and golden printed titles.”

“The soot would dirty the book.”

He sighed weakly and looked down at the scruffy book in his hand.

“The theory in itself is already impossible.”

He sat down on his cushion, I sat onto the wood next to him, I didn’t mind.

He down the spine of the book he was holding.

“Don’t you just wish, Sehun, that sometimes you could just fly away?”

“My problem is…that I fly away too easily,” I looked at him shyly.

His eyes were soft and sad. Boring into me. Soul-reading.

Then he turned away and looked out the window again in melancholy, at the same familiar view of rolling hills and browning trees and damp pebbly walls winding through the fields in the distance. Something burned in me then, like fiery wings igniting in my stomach.

“Let’s go. Let’s fly away.”

He turned to look at me immediately, snapping out of his thoughts from the tone of my voice.

“Let’s fly away like you always wanted to. Go somewhere. Anywhere.”

“Together?”

“Together.”

He smiled.

No matter how trapped you feel.

You are not trapped.

Everyone, everyone single one of us is alone within ourselves.

There’s one thing that can hold us together, and it’s the ground and it’s the sky. You can never be trapped, not as long as there is the breeze and there is a space or a path or an outside. You are your own, and you can walk out into the nothingness of the future whenever. No matter who or how or what, you can let it go and forget. You can do the inhuman. You can forget what isn’t usually forgotten, and remember what should have been remembered.

And yet.

There’s always someone.

Someone appears, and you bind together. Alone, but together. Free, but tied.

No matter how trapped you feel.

There’s always a way, when something like that happens.