if these wings could fly | jezebel

Broken wings, to match the broken girl,

the broken father,

the broken family.

Split in two, they never flutter. Each feather is furled and singed, each fragile bone brittle from the dreaded cold, sweeping through the house and through my body. The winter wind is a hollow and empty cry, howling like a lone wolf in the night.

Hollow,

empty,

just like the echo of the slamming door,

like the pounding of a judge's mallet that screams

GUILTY.

Father isn't proud and Mother isn't smiling

at the crown that will never be perched upon your head.

(It's too heavy anyway.)

You're not made for victory. Everyone has a purpose and yours is to lose

everything,

for it to slip between your fingers.

It's like trying to catch water with cracks between your fist.

You'd trade places with Marley if you could - maybe no one would notice.

But part of you loves the corner, cluttered with ink-stained papers and old books with weathered leather bindings and worn yellow pages, crinkled around the corners by anxious fingers.

No, Father will never be proud,

because he'll never turn his back around.

No, Mother will never smile at you,

because her lips are too cracked like desert ground and smiling

bleeds.

And no, no one will see past the icy screen and veil of murky mist that clings to your skin.

You're ready to go home, to trudge along the long, rocky path that will take you back to the cluttered corner in the room at the end of the hall, to become a ghost once more. Your eyes are already trailing down the old narrow path that snakes left and then right and left again. Home is where the heart is, and yours is nestled between the pages of your books, calling your name in a soft current -

Jezebel, Jezebel, Jezebel.

And your feet move with your mind, down the old narrow path, palms open and empty.

You didn't win anything, though you're a good sheep-sheerer. No one won because there is nothing worth winning - you're not alone, for once (such a strange feeling, company is).

Winning is a joke,

and you've never been good at those.