The Weight of the Sky

Lexile: 1270 | Grade: 11

Passage

Mira had always been fascinated by flight—not the sleek certainty of planes, but the raw defiance of wings. As a child, she’d watched hawks circle thermals above the cliffs near her grandparents’ house, wondering how something so heavy could trust invisible air to hold it. Now, at seventeen, grounded in the final stretch of high school, she thought more often of falling than flying.

Her classmates talked of majors, scholarships, and five-year plans. Mira nodded through the conversations, but her answers felt borrowed. She had no tidy future to announce, only a tangle of doubts. Her GPA was fine, her essays decent—but nothing felt like conviction. What did she want? She wasn’t sure. And worse, she didn’t know how to explain that uncertainty without sounding lost.

One afternoon, after another well-meaning counselor meeting, Mira wandered to the outskirts of town, where an old glider sat rusting on display near the aviation museum. The paint had chipped, but the wings were still wide, still angled toward something bold. She reached out and placed her palm on the cold fuselage. No movement. No answers. Just a whisper of wind and the hum of traffic beyond the fence.

She came back the next day. And the day after. Not for answers, but for quiet. She started sketching—initially the glider, then the birds she saw nearby, then abstract shapes that echoed motion and lift. The act of drawing didn’t give her direction, but it gave her stillness. And in that stillness, something stirred. Not clarity, exactly—but a willingness to begin without it.

Mira applied to a design program, not because she was certain, but because she wanted to learn how to build. Not planes, maybe. Not wings. But bridges between questions and form. She wrote in her essay, 'Some people leap because they know. Others leap because they need to know. I think I am the second kind.'

Months later, as she packed for college, her younger brother asked, 'Aren’t you scared? Going all that way without knowing if it’s right?' Mira smiled and touched the sketchbook now filled with lines that bent and curved like wind. 'Of course I am,' she said. 'But sometimes, not knowing is the best reason to try. Even the sky doesn’t offer guarantees—just space.'