Thinking – it’s 2:32 AM, and I am sleepless. Goosebumps rise on my right leg, not from the cold but overtired. I’m sitting here with my pen, lost in the words of Glück, “Blue Rotunda.”

I am tired of having hands
she said
I want wings —

These words consume me, echoing over and over in my mind, like a silent scream. I want wings, she said. It’s 2 AM, and I’m thinking about the words I love, the ones I reach for when nothing else makes sense—poetry. Poet, try, try.

There’s a longing in these words, a desperate desire to escape the limitations of the human form.

I am tired of having hands
she said
I want wings —

But what will you do without your hands
to be human?

I am tired of human
she said…

These lines stir something. They remind me of another book, Tirra Lirra by the River. It’s not the happiest book, but it’s one I keep coming back to. It’s short, simple, yet it resonates with me in a way that few others do.

The protagonist, Nora, spends her life trying to escape—from her town, her marriage, her family, all the way to London. Her life isn’t extraordinary, but there’s something about her quiet desperation that feels so familiar. It’s like the larks singing, “Tirra Lirra, Tirra Lirra,” a refrain of longing and flight.

“I walked and walked,” Nora says, “sometimes with an objective—a friend’s house, a shop, the church or school—but mostly at random, to outrun oppression.”

There’s something about these stories, these words, that captures the essence of a universal yearning—a desire to transcend, to become something more than just human, more than just hands and feet, tethered to the earth. It’s a longing for wings, for the freedom to live on the sun, away from the confines of a life that feels too small, too ordinary.

Tonight, at 2:32 AM, these thoughts keep me company, a quiet conversation with the poets and characters who understand this need to escape, to soar beyond the mundane. And as I sit here, pen in hand, I can’t help but feel that maybe, just maybe, we all have wings waiting to unfurl.