“Time for Me to Fly”

“Time for Me to Fly” is both a song Bret Ellis privately cherishes and a recurring measure of how he understands growing up. First associated with leaving childhood behind, it later gathers the unresolved desires and losses that his adult act of writing brings back into view.

The Song and a Threshold

In the spring and summer of 1981, the song plays on a mixtape as Bret, Thom Wright, and Susan Reynolds drive back from Windover Stables toward Bel Air. Its lyrics describe a man finding the nerve to end a relationship, but Bret’s attachment to it exceeds that plot: at seventeen, he hears a passage out of one realm and into another. The stable visit matters in his recollection not because an event occurs there, but because the afternoon leads toward the evening when the group first hears that Robert Mallory will join their senior class at Buckley.

The song gives a private soundtrack to the group’s new independence. Their evenings stretch past midnight at Ships, where they drink Cokes and vanilla milkshakes and smoke clove cigarettes; the freedom feels tentative, yet already points away from childhood. In this setting, “flying” means becoming an adult and moving into a new life, a promise Bret can invest in even as the coming school year will complicate it.

Desire and the Uncertain Future

That promise sits beside relationships whose outward ease conceals different kinds of longing. Thom and Susan have been together since sophomore year and move through school as a couple; Bret, Susan’s closest male friend since seventh grade, is secretly in love with her and also carries an unspoken love for Thom. The song’s language of separation therefore resonates beyond its original romantic scenario: it accompanies Bret’s sense of transition while the people closest to him remain bound to attachments he cannot openly claim.

Ryan Vaughn offers another version of the hoped-for departure. He and Bret recognize a private affinity and share the idea of leaving Los Angeles after high school to reinvent themselves elsewhere. Ryan requires secrecy, describing their arrangement as needing “a certain amount of, um, subterfuge,” while the September 1981 weekend they spend together at Bret’s empty Mulholland house later stands in Bret’s memory as their last time untainted by the past. The song’s flight from one realm to another thus becomes an aspiration shadowed by secrecy, separation, and the end of adolescence.

The Song in Adult Memory

Decades later, while writing the book, Bret listens repeatedly to music from that period, including “Time for Me to Fly,” alongside “Vienna,” “Nowhere Girl,” and “Icehouse.” He initially hears these songs as anthems of hope, transformation, and leaving childhood; in the process of writing, they also come to sound like expressions of desperate desire, rejection, and escape. The same music does not simply recover the past: it changes meaning as memory is written and reinterpreted.

That reversal crystallizes in the song’s final association. What once seemed to promise that a child could become a man also evokes, for Bret at fifty-six, a man who remained a child. “Time for Me to Fly” consequently marks both the imagined freedom of becoming someone new and the persistence of the old desires that adulthood did not resolve.