Je voudrais voler

A boy from the Internet (whom I've never met and don't plan to) asked me what superpower I would choose, and I said, without hesitation, "flight."

A few weeks later, I was having a conversation with someone who knows me quite well, and when I told her about how I'd sprained my ankle, and it was taking forever to heal, she immediately gasped and said, "So you couldn't flee."

And I had to laugh, because she was so on the money.

When I wish for the power of flight, I usually mean the ability to fly, in the air, like the birds do. But lately I also yearn for the other kind. Escape.

When the going gets really tough for me, not just tough, but screwy - as in, people are acting weird and I can't deal - I have a powerful desire to flee.

Lately I've been thinking very seriously about leaving not just this apartment, or neighborhood, but the whole city, and in fact, this whole section of the U.S., and really, when it comes right down to it, why not leave the country, and if I'm honest about it, I am highly interested in the search for Earth-like exoplanets.

You think I'm kidding, right? All except Boywich. Boywich will know that I am not kidding. Boywich will be imagining the spacecraft I'm constructing in my head, along with the biohabitat I'm going to need to transport, and what can be built out of native materials on my own private planet, and so on.

Boywich says to me: "You know, sweetie, when you're as intelligent as you are, AND as sensitive as you are, it makes being around other people very difficult."

Yeah, tell me about it. Sometimes I feel like a radio telescope at a rock concert. Ouch.

I rode a lot of miles today, most of it in heavy traffic, and at one point I was a two-truck and two-bus sandwich, trying to maintain balance while hovering and waiting for the flatbed tractor trailer to make a left in front of me (pinned by the buses on the right and the other truck behind). I look at my life and just can't believe it sometimes.