I fell so I flew.

Her hair brushed against my collar bone as I exerted force on the knotted strings of the swing. 

"Faster Lala go faster!"she squeals in delight.

"It's quite fast." I say, now closing my bony fingers around her doughy shoulders.

"It's not! I'm trying to reach the sky" she remarks, getting impatient.

"I'm in a fairly apprehensive mood. You might fall".

"I'll never get to reach the sky" Annie says, disappointed, as she scratches the ground from her heels, drawing skid marks on the damp mud, in order to halt the swing. 

"You sure will. Everyone does." I smirk, ruffling her dark hair. The inevitability of departing souls. God knows when she'll get older enough to have the concept.

"How about we fly kites and make them reach the sky?"

"I'll have the red one!" She hooks her chubby arms in the air as her plump little legs carry her indoors.

"Where to Lala?" Mom thwarts the staircase.

The most embarssing thing about my ordinary life as a whole is the fact that my mom calls me lala infront of everyone.

"Flying kites Mom." I say, slapdashing together the pile of colored kites from the store room.

"I told you not to get Annie into it. She's NOT allowed on the rooftop okay?" She emphasizes, gluing her hands to her hips, jutting her left foot outward.

The classic mommy-rebellious-mood. 

"She is for today though. I'm compensating for not pushing the swing too hard because that's NOT allowed either." I say hastily, ducking under her arm, that is hindering the staircase.

"Rooftops are severely NOT allowed Lala!" She screams after me.

"Gotto reach the sky Mom" I scream back, twice as piercing.

Flying kites is as ecstatic for me as winning a jackpot may be for you.

Kites are vibrant. When I am in low spirits, I wish upon the kites, and hang them on the fixtures as high as I can. With each passing second, the kites swarm through the dullness of the sky, instilling colored streaks in the horizons. It makes me happy.  

Think of it. When you're despondent and down in the pit of dark, you might want to fly kites.

It's therapy. It's an escape.

"All aboard!" I exclaim in my best pirate-with-the-eyepatch voice as Annie delightedly takes her position behind me and clutch the widest part of my waist.

I let Annie hold the string while I race and throw the kite up in the sky. I tell her to sit in the middle of the rooftop and away from the edges as I pace backward and backward, pulling the kite.

The most scariest thing about flying kites is, flying them with Annie. It's true that I hate the idea of having her on the rooftop because rooftops are fairly dangerous but it always feels unfair when I don't take her up with me because she simply adores watching me flying as much as she adores watching telly tubbies. Telly tubbies mean a lot to her and on that note, you might have understood the acendancy of her likeness toward kite watching.  

Now the kite is riding well above the tufts of clouds. It swims through the sky, smiling at us from above. 

"It reached the sky!" Annie squeaks merrily.

Now when I say I love flying kites, it doesn't necessarily mean I nail it. 

For the most part, I do nail it for precisely a minute and a half and then I deliberately screw it. 

It's just one of the things that I nail for a moment or so and screw it the next moment or so. I meant it when I said my life is ordinary.

I have tried flying kites in all the ways that I could conjure. I have tried flying in the garden, in my gran's backyard, in my school playground and once in the ice skating rink (I was deeply hated by the skaters for that.)

And everytime, I managed the kite to stay up in the sky for exactly 1.5 minutes. Never a second more or less. 

Then I chose flying at the rooftop not because I gained extra seconds but because it felt higher than when I was on the ground.

It felt better. But I didn't break any records anyway.