Open Flight

OPEN FLIGHT
by Thomas G. Robinson



The ocean air was cool to breathe, coming ashore in wild gusts off vast stretches of the Pacific. My hair flailed in time and rhythm with trees and grasses of the shoreline. A heavy, rolling, curling surf tumbled and roared. Infinitely wild, it leapt and bounded up the solid rock beachhead, blasting a relentless profusion of spray cascading high into the air, and drenching all in a salty briny bath.
Bright sunrays of midday beamed through water droplets hanging on my eyelashes, glinted into a constantly morphing kaleidoscopic blaze of rain bowed light. Above the deafening roar rose the shrill cacophonic choir of the climbing, diving gulls.

My brother was, in some ways, a lot like those gulls. He had a sharp, buoyant humor that would carry you up beyond the clutches of the staid reality, like those gulls dash over and beyond the ocean swells with the ease of their graceful flight. His soft laughter would carry you above the dull grinding roar of the daily slog.
There was a time when my brother would have braved those waves with gusto and excitement and even glee. He would guide his craft steeply up, over those breakers, and away from the shoreline toward the total freedom of the open sea. It was always freedom that he had desired most. More than money, more than possession for possession's sake, more than any fame or anything that fame had to offer.
Freedom is something that is in itself totally free of cost, yet it can be at once a thing of such great expense. It is a simple thing, yet a thing not so simple, but yet a thing profound.
It is something with different meaning for each who might take time to consider the point.
Freedom.
In the end, my brother did find his freedom, freedom from all things earthly. He found freedom from this life. In his youthful folly, he dared the reality of chemical poisoning,
and pushed the line a little too far. For that daring, he paid the ultimate price. He found his freedom in the endlessness of death.