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Can Fly

Horror and doubt distract His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stirr The Hell within him, for within him Hell He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more then from himself can fly By change of place.
--John Milton, Paradise Lost

          With my wings, I can do anything except fly. It took magic to make them right, coathangers and little-girl burgundy pantyhose combined to make the defining element of a fairy, my Halloween costume. Pagans call the holiday Samhain, and say that the veils between the physical world and the ethereal one are thin and slightly parted right before and after the night. Though I had already lost faith in this beautiful idea by the weekend leading up to the crisp Monday of Halloween 2005, there was something wacky in the wind, something as surreal as the events taking place.
          The wings themselves changed, just as I did, from Friday to Tuesday. The three years spent as a 'straightedge' kid, abstaining from drugs, alcohol and sex to preserve self-control and dignity, were nullified when I broke my edge. I knew that the submission to intoxication signaled a greater-scale breakdown. After a few bad months, involving an ill-handled romance and a lot of time gone to philosophy and poetry, I needed to do something different. It started with the creation of my wings, a whole new side of myself. Then came the need for new people and new experiences, perhaps what I'd been missing when insisting on staying clean.
          "This may be the most idyllic moment of our teenage lives," one of my friends intoned, as we sat alone in a house whose owner would not return for days. We raised our glasses and drank. I took off my wings to be more comfortable. One bottle of cranberry juice, one bottle of Georgi, and one harrowing encounter with a teacher when I went to get said juice later, we were splashing in the puddle of drunkenness. We soaked in smiles for a while, but then drops of tears and anger mottled the surface. In this new blurriness, I noticed my wings, perched on a table.
          Furious at the boy who had kicked my heart into the goalpost of his bedroom, a burst of realization warmed its way through my liquified head: These wings are responsible for the weirdness. No normal, happy person has wings. The only rational course of action was to destroy them, bend the wire and break through the nylon. My friends stood by, horrified, too caught up in their own soon-to-be-hungover heads to do anything about the wings. Satisfied that they were warped beyond recognition, I dropped the twisted frames onto the carpet and made an angry phone call to a boy.
          Lucidity made a comeback once we stepped into the cold air. I scrabbled to straighten out my thoughts and the makeshift wings. The malleable metal went more or less back into shape, but my drunken epiphany had been halfway right. The wings might not have been the direct cause, but these changes were made when wearing them., and they provided an apt metaphor. It would have been easy to blame my current state of transience on the rift in the fabric of spirituality, but it seemed that my old heretic faith had failed me. No, I was as misshapen and self-made as the wings strapped to my back, a mess of good intentions and lofty goals, whether in the form of magic tricks or something resembling love.
          The wings stayed attached over my shoulderblades through the weekend, in school and at work, hanging out with friends and running errands. I did some more things for the first time, dropped some old habits, thought a lot. By Monday night, after trolling for trick-or-treating goodies for hours, I knew that the enchantment had worn off of the wings. The deep red of the fabric had ripped around the metallic rims, leaving exposed wire and half an inch of stressed fabric. The clear bands used to hold the wings onto my body were stretched to their plastic limits. In a direct parallel, my spirit was stressed and stretched, my skin barely containing extra mass of accumulated personality. My wings did not enable me to fly any further from myself, but they did help me change that self.