The wings on my back...I could feel them. Of course, I could always feel them. They weren't really there, not even by the largest stretch of my imagination. I had to ignore them, just to keep myself whole and alive. But they were there in a way...not a real way, but still there. I could feel them.
And they were broken.
It was something I hadn't realized until just recently. I'd been able to feel them for the longest time, and they were always calling to me, telling me to leap into the sky and fly with them. Telling me to feel the wind embrace me and the rapture of flight. But then, one day, I realized that they were broken.
Just as before, I could feel even the slightest detail of the wings. Someone would brush a hand against my back, and I would feel the twin sensations of the hand on my bare skin as well as the same hand running down the length of the wings that weren't really there. I was surprised that I hadn't gone crazy just from that constant confusion of what exactly my clothing was touching, what my lover would run his hand against...what I was feeling. Was it wings, or back, or both? But not just that...I could almost feel each and every feather, despite the fact that even if they were real, I knew that feathers didn't have nerves. Feathers, while lodged in the skin of the wings that weren't really there, were just dead bits that I grew, like hair, and weren't really part of what I should feel.
But I could feel them, as well as what felt like each and every bone in the wings. And, after that one day, I could feel that those same bones were all broken neatly in half. The breaks were, each and every one of them, clean, more like someone had come through and carefully sawed each one in half rather than breaking them. And they hurt.
My wings weren't really there, and I knew that. But I couldn't reconcile that fact with the pain that I felt. After then, every touch to my back brought yelps of pain, as the hand also touched phantom wings that the other person didn't know were there. And that hand would jostle the ruin of my wings, sending a jolt of pain through my back that shouldn't have been there, because there was nothing really wrong with me.
It became so that I couldn't even stand to wear my shirt. The shirt, just as a carelessly placed hand, rubbed against the broken wings every time I moved. Even the slight pressure caused by the weight of the fabric was too much, sending lances of white-hot pain through my entire back. And then, after that, I found that just the weight of my wings caused the pain, so that I had to spend my entire day laying on my stomach in fear of moving, because even shifting my weight a little would cause the pain to come again.
But my dreams of flying, of surrendering myself to the wind, continued. I couldn't fly, and I knew that. Even if the wings were real, which they weren't, they could never hold me in the air. Instead, I would just plummet to the ground faster, as the wind pressed against my broken wings and caused the pain to double, or even triple from the onslaught of invisible mass around them. I had to live with both the pain and the dreams of flying, and wonder if maybe the psychiatrists had been right when they first told me that my wings, and my insistent desire to jump and test them, were a suicidal urge.
Maybe, as I resisted the urge to jump, the other, hidden urge deep inside of me strengthened, and finally decided to try a different approach. Instead of trying to make me jump, it would just make my life so miserable with the pain and unfulfillable longing to fly that I would do it myself and take my life.
What it didn't realize when it did that, was that I would be unable to even do that, for fear of the pain in my tattered, broken wings.