I want you, right now, to shut your eyes. Imagine yourself looking into a mirror, but the mirror is special. The mirror knows your deepest secrets and it reflects the image of yourself back to you, however it reflects back your reflection with the one thing you most want to change about your body, changed. Now, be honest with yourself, what is it that you see in that mirror? Are your eyes bigger, your nose smaller, your muscles more defined, your protruding gut a bit less defined? What is that one thing that you hate about yourself that you really want to change? I know what my one thing is. I would wish not to have wings.

I am Eric Roberts, I am 17 years old, and I have wings. When I was a little boy my father used to tell me the story of Icarus. This was the story of a little boy whose father had given him wings to fly, and he hadn’t heeded his father’s warnings, and he fell.

“But you will listen to me, won’t you, son,” My father would say as he tousled my blonde hair. “Because you know that I will protect you. And always remember that these wings will make people fear you. People don’t like people who are different. The wings are beautiful and they make you special, but you must never use them to fly.”

I would nod my head and smile and hug my father and promise to always obey him, but in secret I would fly as high as I could. I prayed that the sun would melt away my wings and that I could just be a normal boy. But my wings were real, were not held together with wax. And when I flew closer to the sun, I only felt a chill, no warmth to melt away my curse.

The worst part about flying so high is that whenever I looked back down at the earth I saw something that I didn’t want to see, I saw the truth, that human beings are so small and insignificant. And when I was young I would cry knowing that I was so much bigger than everyone else because I could see them for what they were, small.

My father always insisted on driving me to school. He would not let me fly. I refused to sit on the bus and listen to kids whisper about my wings taking up too many seats. I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license because it meant I finally did something that every other person did, but it didn’t distract much because whenever I showed my driver’s license to my friends they would still see the large white wings protruding from my mid back, acting as a background for my photo.

Everybody at school knows I can fly, despite my best efforts. People ask me all the time if I can fly them somewhere, or if I can just take them up into the air. My answer is always the same. “Sorry,” I’ll say through the biggest grin I can muster, “I don’t fly.”

But every night I lie in bed and feel my wings beneath me just itching to fly away. I push away those feelings. They aren’t right. They aren’t natural. Nobody else in the world has these feelings. I am alone.

I don’t have a lot of friends. I prefer it that way. Friends are hard to come by when you have wings, and more often than not, people pretend to like me, just to see if I will fly for them. Well the joke is on them, I don’t fly. In fact, my only real friend is Alice. I don’t know Alice’s last name, but she and I are very good friends. She is the only person that I let see me fly. She claps whenever she sees me in the air, until I float back down to her window and we talk.

Alice is an older woman, and she lives in an assisted care home about a mile away from my house, but she has amnesia and delusions. Often, these delusions keep her up late, so at night sometimes I fly past her window to see if she is awake. Alice makes me feel safe because she tells me things about her life just as much as I tell her things about mine. She is so easy to talk to, I guess you could say Alice has been like a mother to me.

My mother passed away. I don’t know how or when, and I don’t remember her at all, and my father does not talk about her. Despite my total lack of knowing her, I miss her. Alice and I talk about my mother, even though neither of us knew her, and then I fly away to sneak back into my room.

Alice and I were talking once and she told me that she was different growing up too. I asked her why and she said that she used to have wings. But she loved her wings and she would fly for anybody who asked her too. I didn’t say anything to this because it makes no sense, why would Alice ever love her wings? I asked Alice what happened to her wings and she told me that she met someone, the love of her life. She was afraid because she had never had such strong feelings. Alice said the man loved her for more than her wings, and he never asked her to fly. He even asked if she ever thought about getting rid of the wings.

I imagined a young Alice laughing this comment off, saying something like, “I would never want to get rid of these wings, silly.”

Alice told me that despite his subtle comments she loved him more than anything, and so she married him. Together they had a beautiful baby and they were the happiest family, until one day something happened. She woke up with her husband standing over her with a knife. He told her that he was going to fix her problem. From there she doesn’t remember much, she woke up at a hospital, and her wings were gone, along with many of her memories.

I felt terrible, because I realized that Alice would look into that special mirror and long for the wings I so desperately wanted to get rid of.

Earlier today I mentioned Alice to my father and his face told me the story that he never would. He stared at me palely, and I realized everything. I realized the truth. I saw the flash of recognition of her name. I saw the flash of fear on his face at being discovered, and then I saw a flash of anger. He kept me grounded all this time because he was afraid of what the wings really meant. He was afraid because my wings tied him to his deepest fears; he looked in the mirror next to me, and he saw me without wings.

I ran out the door of my house, and before my father could say a word I flew into the open sky. I finally felt the heat of the sun. After all these years of feeling only a chill, I finally felt the heat.