Take These Broken Wings -- Heather Elliot

I used to think the sun followed me wherever I went, the breath of a sunrise propelling my anatomy of starred wings as I took flight - but really, it was me who chased after the sun. I was so desperate to swallow a droplet of it’s light to quench the inevitable rise and fall of darkness within me. But can any showers of sun blanket the torrents of dark storms I’m fabricated of?

I am a child conceived from darkness.

My existence is that of an extinguished and fallen star that’s cut through the cloak of their mother’s night sky, whose gravitational push and pull has weakened with the orbit of their father’s moon. Obscurity and shadows from the nightfall has flooded every atom and fiber constructed upon my being, and anchored me away into the pitfall of this physical hell where I destroy everything I touch. My sisters and brothers still shine above me in a dazzling halo smeared across our Mother’s darkness, white light pouring from their harbored spots in the cosmos. Each night, I’d try to gather their light in the ghostly pale palm of my hands, catching the glowing reflection of the stars through the thick glass window in my bedroom, hoping it’s luminosity could smother the frigid darkness I’ve been abandoned with. But, the moment I fell from the sky (like a burnt candle that could no longer be sparked), bleak oblivion has filled every facet of the shining past I once must’ve possessed, and the light drains through my trembling finger tips even as I try to desperately cling on to it’s brilliance. I am too dark to even hold any thread of light in my lost hands.

It made sense when I killed my mother. A child conceived from darkness, who was so full of shadows and obscurity, killed someone who once glowed so amorously, with a light and radiance the world would never obtain again. My darkness eclipsed the Sun of my mother, and, as soon as my infant cries first pierced the newly shattered atmosphere, day fell and night arose.

I think my mother joined my sisters and brothers in their places in the universe. She’s more than just a star, though – she’s the surging comet that flashes against the blank canvas of an ominous night, a single and bright tear in the earth’s atmosphere who passed by too fast for me to process what it was. My mother’s comet is gone in the second where I part my lips to make a wish. (She was breath taking in passing, regretful in absence, yet still grateful for ever existing.) She can’t shine here, anymore, but she still illuminates the world when darkness tries to prevail. And maybe that’s why I yearn for the sky, to join my mother’s flight with the stars, even while Auntie always tells me to, “Love the earth, child, love the earth – for the sky is an impossible feat.”

Auntie warned me, though, didn’t she? She knew all along. I tried to take my flight, and now the world is watching as I crash and burn.

“Your time is up, Birdy.”

I used to be enraptured with my own darkness. I always thought I was victim to the night sky, that I was a broken winged bird who was swallowed whole by shadows and nightmares about falling, falling, falling down to the inevitable fate of the egg who fell too soon out of the nest. But I should’ve known that I wasn’t darkness, that I wasn’t some folly prey to nightfall. I should’ve known that I am the night, and that starlight filled the anatomy of my existence, and I’ve held that spark of illumination in the pool of my glowing eyes my entire life.

But, sometimes, you can’t see what’s bright until you’re left completely in the dark.

When Death grabs my hand again, I hear the echo of a cannon’s fire in the distance, and then I am gone.

A tree stands in front of me, it’s roots planted deep within the chasms of the ground. When I look up at the light that shines through the whistling and fluttering cracks of the leaves that cling loosely to its branches, carcasses of my past, present, and future hang above me along the bokeh of dazzling sunspots and almost transparent foliage. My hands curiously reach for higher heights, once again, when I begin to climb towards it – but, this time, without the fear of falling.

And I climb, knowing that the top of this tree is where I need to be.

I’ve been in winter for so long, now, that I’ve forgotten the fluidity and warmth of a blossoming spring. Too long have I waited in dark somber nights, the chill of a snow storm embedding itself around my body chin high. Too long has it been since I felt the innocence of a bright day, where the Sun’s touch streamed from an untouchable sky and reached ever aspect of my childish fantasies. But, in this moment, the light that streaks from above melts away the frost that’s grown like icicles on my skin, and its fluorescent glow swims across my flesh in wavy and oceanic patterns. For once, nothing is left with a shadow.

With each feather light step upwards, I’m acquainted with a facet of my past: The newborn cries of a baby as my eyes witnessed light beyond my mother’s womb for the first time. The first timid step I took forward across the splintered floorboards of my home in Eleven. The picnics in yellow meadows and green vineyards with Uncle Dorian’s guitar and Aunt Meryl’s stories. The aroma of freshly baked bread wafting around me in irresistible ripples as I enter the bakery’s kitchen in the morning. The giggles of Ava and Atimia as they stride towards me in the gray cobble stoned paths of town. The middle-of-the-night escapades to rooftops and treetops and anywhere that lifted me higher to the sky I yearned for. The songs sung to the open ears of listeners and the songs unsung to the beating of a rhythmic heart. The words said with a shy and unsure lip and the words unsaid that stuck like cotton in the middle of my throat. The sorries apologized, and the sorries forgiven. The blood shed, and the wounds healed. All the facets of my past rushed through me in the split of a millisecond. My life flickered before my eyes in the form of that candle flame I so wanted to harbor, and (just as Life always is) before I had time to process those memories, the flame once again extinguished, and they were gone.

Only, this time, I wasn’t left in the dark.

There’s a song in the gusts of wind that grazes me, a swelling lullaby a mother would coo while caressing her child to sleep. The vertebraes of the lullaby sways the branches of the tree, and, in a fleeting moment, I know the song is my mother’s call to me. If the song is in the wind, then, surely, my mother’s voice will guide my wings towards home.

As I climbed, I began to know everything and yet nothing at all. I heard the cries of Aria Wolfe and her brothers and Wednesdae Drummond and Naveen Casonvik as they continued to fight for their lives. And I heard the weeps of Aunt Meryl and Uncle Dorian and Ava and Atimia as they watched with sunken eyes as my own body sunk into newly dug ground. And I heard the tears of twenty four families as they reminisced over the would’ves, could’ves, and should’ves of the lives of the dead and of the one who lived. But, if there was anything I learned from living, it’s that Life goes on. And the flowers on twenty three graves will bud and blossom every spring, and the Sun behind the rolling hills will rise and ascend every morning, and the tears of the mourner will water the new life just beginning to start in the absence of ours. Life goes on, and the second it doesn’t, Death will always be there to lead you back home.

I used to think darkness consumed every fiber of my being, that darkness dictated my shallow breaths and timid steps. And that darkness wasn’t some second skin I could shed off or rip away – it was entwined with my spirit, it throbbed with my blood vessels, it pulsed with my heart beat. I used to think there was no escape from my darkness.

My mother isn’t here, but the song she sends me sheds away all that darkness that once consumed me. It disintegrates into gossamery shadows, pooling at my feet until it’s venom drains and the hurricane that’s swept the guilty pulses of my heart no longer aches my sweet abyss, but fades out into the tides of the gentle yellow horizon. Her lullaby conjugates a swell in my chest, in my veins, in my throat. Her lullaby produces the same throbbing sensation that rick-racketed my lips when I first sang on the rooftop of the bakery with Uncle Dorian eight years ago. Except now, every crescendo and legato and slur and staccato and beat of her song echoes within the cavern of my ghost, and it is vital that my voice should join hers.

When I reach the top and witness the faulty haze of the sky’s yellow morning and orange dusk and purple twilight all meshed together, I can see the thread of light that streams through the horizon – the border between earth and sky. The swelling lullaby ebbs from the horizon, and I know she’s there waiting for me. So when my wings extend, I don’t fly.

I soar.