Sun Trace Snow

The angels are twining through the snow. They lie beautiful and fallen with white wings and white skin. Slowly, slowly, the pieces of sky are flaking off, spiralling towards gravity. There is no blue, no green in its infinite eyes.

I lie among the angels, broken, fallen, beautiful. And for inches or miles there is only us.

The horizon is unbreakable, colourless.

In my mind, I travel backwards to the memories no more than minutes old.

The lonely girl leaves footprints with no sound. She traces, meticulously, a deep wound in the snow. Quietly curving, dipping, swelling. And finally, the point. Shattering, piercing.

A perfect heart, a wishful reflection of her own damaged one.

Love me, it pleads.

And in this memory, the angel lands from above. Nameless, faceless, but he holds her with his gaze. Eyes of the cerulean sparrow, lost among clouds of dreams and stars.

They do not belong here, where the gray light catches and illuminates dark-gold imperfections. The halo seems to come from behind, highlighting rare metallic flecks between the blue.

She reaches, broken, soundless.

“What would you give, for my wings?” His voice is beautiful and fallen.

“Everything.”

“So be it.”

She does not blink when he lunges forward. His arms stretch out in an embrace, and she nearly feels the warmth in his figure.

However, before she knows it, the elegant fingers are leaving nothing more than slits of winter sunlight in her vision, his suffocating touch stretched out carefully against her eyes, her nose, her mouth.

Don’t breathe, don’t breathe, don’t see, don’t love.

Don’t live, don’t breathe, don’t breathe. The angel blurs as her gaze slowly darkens.

Panicked and desperate, she writhes in his arms, but life is leaving her as quickly as it came.

In a final pulse of vision, she sees his pearl-feathered wings cocoon their distorted form.

And that is when I understand.

___________________________________

The dream splinters, cracks, and finally shatters. The girl, who is myself and not myself, dies quietly among the tangled regions of my mind.

“What would you give, for my wings?”
“Everything.”

The icy blanket still lies cold and white and beautiful against my back. The sky still haunted by shades without colour.

Around me, there is a deep wound in the snow. Once upon a time, the lonely girl traced it so meticulously and wished it for her own. She lied among the broken and the beautiful and fell into a fantasy of the magic for which she searched in her unhappy world.

I take it back, angel boy. I don’t want your wings.

Somewhere inches or miles above my head, an ashen cloud edges sideways. Someplace worlds or planets beyond my thoughts, the sun is shining brightly through the fraction of a space allowed by the cloud.

Not on me. Not on the perfect reflection of a damaged heart.

No, it floats on the expanse of snow. The untouched and newly fallen.

Far, far back in my mind, I see the angel boy fade away.

And when my laugh at last cuts through the snowy silence, it is not broken at all.