White Winged

by Maddi

When you find the most beautiful thing, nothing will ever be better. But then you don't know that at the time. There are things I can only see looking back; that tell me now what I wish I knew then. That I felt him before I even walked out the door; I didn't know it was him then but now I am almost certain it was. Stepping out of the smoke and sweat clogged air into the bracing, crisp night. The darkness seemed friendlier somehow, like a warm welcome. Welcomed to the darkness of the night I turned and saw my new home. Weakly veiled as prey I assumed the hunt of the predator I am. I did not know he was the best; at the time he was simply one of the better.

I took him and fed off of him and tasted the best; and I was the best because he was there. I took advantage of his willingness and trespassed over untouched beauty. That night, as he lay beside me, I dreamed of birds. Something white colored; pigeons or doves. They were flying because that's what birds do. I got the feeling that the birds enjoyed flying; that they must get some type of pleasure from it. But these birds in my dream were ignorant. I knew they didn't know just what an amazing thing they could do, and they had no idea how many humans wished they could do what they took for granted.

I reached up into the sky and touched their feathers. They were very soft. I pulled their feathered bodies close to me and curled up around them feeling the impossibly soft feathers warming my bare skin. About then I started to feel my head; it was not happy with me and demonstrated this by giving me sharp shots of pain with every pulse of blood. Squeezing the soft bird in my arms I found that nature could not produce a pigeon of the size I was currently cuddling and I opened my eyes to face the sky. At least, I thought it was the sky. He had very blue eyes in the morning and they could be mistaken easily for the sky by anybody whose head hated them as much as mine did me at that moment.

Everything that happened after that I don't want to talk about. Or think about. Or acknowledge at all. Let's just skip ahead awhile to this really nice beach in Italy, because that's when things got good again. He was in the water getting very red and I was sitting under a tree near the top of the beach getting not nearly as red as he. I just thought he'd enjoy the beach because it was a really nice one. One of the most beautiful I'd ever seen. Cloudless blue skies; shiny golden sand with amazingly loud waves constantly bombarding it with their endless, passionate roar.

The interesting part came after we left the beach and were in bed together around midnight. We were on our stomachs, both our backs smothered in aloe balm to cool the captured heat in our skin. He was sleeping lightly, more comfortable on his stomach then I, it being his preferred sleeping position.

I was not so lucky and wiggled my way around the bed letting my mind drift to unimportant things. I needed to get my nails clipped, they had grown far too long and had more then once gotten caught on the loose fabric of the bed sheets. Stevie Nicks sure sang some good songs. One of them had been stuck in my head while sitting on the beach today. We had been listening to it in the car while driving there. I didn't know which album the song had been on. Maybe he knew? I had looked down at him from my place under the tree and couldn't find him anywhere in the deserted landscape. Half a second of panic later I relaxed as his body jumped up in sync with a particularly bracing wave. Arms spread above his head with a smile as wide as the whole beach he rode the wave to shore. I noticed his hair was the same color as the sun spangled sand.

He gave a short snort loud enough to rouse me from my wondering thoughts. I realized I was very thirsty and gently moved out of the bed and padded into the kitchen to retrieve a bottle from the fridge. I was guzzling it down in front of the open fridge when a soft shuffle of footsteps brought him into the light of the fridge door. When he's tired he walks in this little waddle, like a brain damaged duck. Lightly swaying, always just about to bump in to something and appearing to move forward with nothing more than pure luck. Still he made it all the way to stand beside me and take the now half empty bottle from my hand and bring it to his own lips to finish it off.

Right then I realized. This was it. He was it. It wouldn't get any better than this; him. This man was the most beautiful thing I had ever encountered or ever would. This man with his eyes too close together to be truly handsome. This man with sleep scrunching his brow making him look about 12. This man who had just stolen my bottle of Mountain Valley Spring Water. I don't know if I showed any outward symptoms of my epiphany. He didn't react; he just put the almost empty bottle back in the fridge even though he knows how much I hate him doing that. I was standing right in front of him; he pulled the door closed, looked up at me for a second, then took my hand loosely and pulled me back to bed.

After that I felt a little shaky but I did fall asleep. In the morning the feeling was gone. That shook me; it had been so strong last night, so absolute. I could barely stand it. But then that made sense. I could never stand to feel something that powerful every minute of everyday. It had probably gone where all my other strong emotions go. I just seemed to file them away to avoid them affecting my decisions too deeply. Taking note of them then pushing them aside. It almost shocked me that it had become instinct to do that with anything I might be feeling. Even if it was something I wanted to examine more closely.

It saddened me that my defenses had done away with one of the greatest emotions I had ever felt. I felt angry with myself and frustrated that I had so little control over my own mind. This was the first time I had ever truly looked at this and I thought about all the times that people have said things like 'Brian has no emotion' and 'Do you feel nothing?' It was all starting to make a creepy kind of sense. Now that I knew what was different about me the next question was what was I going to do about it? To undo a lifetime of defenses would take another lifetime; it would take me years to even understand it. Was it worth it?

Spreading out on the bed I reached across for him. Hitting empty air, I looked across to find his sleeping place empty, smelling slightly of the aloe balm. He must have rolled over at some time in the night. Or maybe I had? The sound of clanking crockery was drowned as he started singing rather badly. Damn morning person. Watching him through the doorway moving around making breakfast, I felt a soft glow at his perfection. It was a corner of a shadow of what I had felt last night. I could remember the emotion and that gave me hope.

It would be worth it to once again 'know' that he was it. Because even though I no longer 'knew', I could remember 'knowing' and that memory was still so strong that my mind was made up. I would try and then succeed, for there was no other choice when I decided to do something. Though I feared this would be my greatest challenge; to fix my own fucked up mind. I would find a way to let myself know that he was the most beautiful thing; that nothing would ever be better. Until then I had the memory, I would not let myself forget.

End

The Song: Stevie Nicks - Edge of Seventeen