...the Darkness of a Hotel Bed. Quakertown, PA.

I wish I had wings again.

There was a time when I could soar with the rest of the flying creatures, lifted to heights where things like dreams rest their heads. I had wings, and they were alive with beauty! Beauty akin to the first snow, or the sinking of great mysteries. Wings composed of simple things, like twigs and leaves, the stray feather here and there to make the framework whole and they would swing onto my shoulders and I would breathe them into being.

It wasn't always so easy. I began in the forest. Hidden away in a patchwork of trashcans and shrubs I collected the necessary pieces. Once they could support my weight, I began working to make them move. It's not as easy as walking, believe me. To compare flying to walking is to compare diamonds to doughnuts. It requires an inner harmony. I would begin a breathing exercise... first exhaling my doubts... everything holding me to the ground... exhale disbelief, depression, paranoia... then the big things... exhale reality... exhale certainty... exhale gravity... then, and only then, did I feel...

...taller. That's what it was at first. I grew an inch taller. And then days passed and I could grow three inches. It was another week before I realized I wasn't growing... I was floating. Just slightly. Inches above the ground. The outlines of shadows forming beneath my very own feet. I made markings with a rock against the trunk of an old elm tree beside my secret launchpad.

Weeks I spent, simply perfecting the art of floating, until eventually I could maneuver my way past the limbs of the trees and float above the treeline, and actually glimpse the surrounding houses in the distance. I saw parents pulling in to their driveways, through windows I could see kids fight over Super Nintendo... I had a key to the inside of the world. I still remember the warm breeze against my legs as the massive wings beat in time against my sides, like I was part of the wind... part of the sky.

I learned the language of other beings. The chirps of the sparrow, the calls of the proud hawk... even the thousand ways to decipher the hoots of the night owl... and let me tell you, if you let them... they will never shut up... all about mice this and rabbit that. It gets old.

I ascended to the clouds, which, if you've never been, will knock the wind out of you. I still remember colliding with a cumulus over Arlington Heights and plummeting towards the earth at a tremendous speed... don't mean to ruin the ending or anything, but I lived.

As much as I loved my life away from the boundaries that awaited me on land, I couldn't help but wonder why I was the only one like me aloft in the sky. I searched for others, even asked the birds that would speak slowly enough for me to understand... and I was apparently a unique occurrence.

I came down to the ground. Slowly. Unthinking, really. The way a child lets go of a ball without knowing. I lowered myself down, away from the sunlight, below the treetops, to where it all began.

I unstitched the wings from my teenage frame and set them down on the ground, where they became just nothings again. Just twigs and leaves and lost feathers. And I forgot the language of the flying things. I was so willing somehow to let it all go.

I stepped away, towards the western gape of the forest, towards the late afternoon sunlight, a path of trembling twigs and dead leaves in my wake. I headed out of the forest and, had I looked behind me right then, I would've seen it all changing form... trees changing direction, things that once were, being no longer... a world that I had unwittingly, though meticulously, crafted... becoming nothing more than a patch of barely suitable shelter from the seeing world.

And in the distance I could hear them... the boys of my neighborhood... their voices rattling like strung tin cans on dirt road. I wanted to join them... to live among my own kind. The unmistakable crack of a smooth round wooden bat against a smooth round rubber ball sent it gliding towards me, whistling with the speed against the current until it landed at my feet. I picked it up, and wiping it clear of dew I held it to my chest, hoping perhaps for a taste of its momentum, but it was clear that it had gone.

As I walked towards the baseball diamond, towards the pack of boys waiting to resume their game, a flight of ducks caught my eye. A part of me felt only admiration though, wonderment... as if, like all men, I had always admired them from this vantage... as if I had never traversed the northern corridor among their ranks... as if I hadn't known their names... as if I'd been human all along.

Every now and then, something in me hears the words in the birdsong... and something in me beats, once more, for wings.

That's all for now.