Relief washed over my body and my soul felt still. I had done what I needed to do: saved her once when I was alive and once when I was dead.
“I would do it again.” The world around me grew fuzzy as I said it, as though I were on the brink of sleep. “Given the choice, I would always do it again.”
And I began to float.
Up, out of the arms of my siblings, over the roofs. They waved.
I could feel myself starting to fade. I flew past the street lamps. Drifting through them, I shorted them out with brief explosions of electricity before the street settled into blackness. In the aching darkness, the sky was full of pinholes of light.
I floated on my back and look up at the stars before I left. There had been billions of stars that I had never seen with those streetlights on.
I relished in them.
I was an insignificant, deceased piece of the universe. But I had people who loved me. That was enough.
I traced the outline of Cygnus with my vanishing finger. Tonight, I understood: it was not the constellation of failed flight. I spread my arms wide like Cygnus’s wings, and drifted on my back like the sky swan as the white began to surround me. In the last few seconds, it felt like I was soaring.