beautiful monsters

make a wish

When I was a kid I used to chase thistledown “fairies”. The rule was, if you caught one, and it still had a seed, you took the seed out and blew the fairy away. If the wind caught it, your wish would come true. If the seed was already missing, or the fairy drifted to the ground, or got snagged on a branch, no wish.

These days I’ve kind of given up on wishes. But sometimes, when I’m feeling really upset, or depressed, or anxious, I remind myself to look up. In the middle of the city, I stop rushing around for a moment, and notice the clouds racing across the sky, or feel the wind. And almost always, there’s the odd thistledown fairy, sailing between the skyscrapers.

How far does the average thistledown fairy fly? There can’t be that many thistle patches near the corner of Courtney Place and Taranaki St. Where do they all come from?

Yesterday, I was sitting on a bench behind the law school, drinking coffee with a friend. We’d picked this particular bench because it was in the shade; the sun had only just disappeared behind the top of the building. I’d been having a hard day, well, a whole series of hard days. Anyway, during a pause in the conversation, while we contemplated how miserable life can be, my friend suddenly said “look at the fairies!” There were a few of them drifting past, just near us. And then I looked up.

Like I said, the sun had just ducked behind the building, and there was some thin filmy cloud high up, so there was a bright halo around the sun that we could still see the edge of. And looking towards that bright spot, we could see the fairies, so many of them, dozens, hundreds, thousands, streaming past in the wind. It looked like someone was firing them out from that bright spot over the roof, like a snow machine or something. I think there must have been hundreds of them passing in front of that bright patch every second. As they caught the sun they burned, brilliant white gold, for a moment. Then the ones lower down faded to white and drifted past into the city. But the ones higher up dissolved into the blue of the sky as they past out of the spotlight.

They can’t really have all been appearing from that one spot in the sky over the law school, so I guess there must have been millions of them, in every direction, it’s just we couldn’t see them so high up unless the sun was catching them. It must have been thistle season, peak thistledown release time. It was like they'd decided this was their moment, their chance to invade, to take over the city. I almost expected to wake up this morning and find thistles growing in every crack and crevace of the city.

My friend said they looked more like angels than fairies, and they did, glowing so brightly against the blue sky, dancing and spinning and speeding past on the Wellington wind.

So today I’m wandering through the city, imagining that there are countless wishes and angels, whizzing through the air above me. I only have to look up, and trust they’re there.

Posted by Fionnaigh at March 21, 2007 12:31 PM | TrackBack