Winged

Starlight lapped at my feet in rhythm, and still the owl did not speak to me.

She never did. I could beg and plead and cry and still she would watch me, wide eyes reflecting the night, never to answer my questions. I don’t know why I kept asking. Perhaps it was simply because there was no one else. I had no one left in my life to catch my tears except for her.

The dock where we sat on that final night was precarious. It was older than I was, and still I perched on it, half hoping it would collapse under my weight and let me drown in the depths. I knew it would hold me despite my darker thoughts. It had no other option. The starry hosts above reflected in the river below and washed the world in moonlight. My reflection looked back at me from the water’s surface: a dirty boy on the cusp of being a man, begging an owl for directions after being lost for seventeen years.

The summer had stretched its legs and sprinted now, turning the world in such a way that I got dizzy if I thought about it for too long. Crickets chirped around us, and frogs croaked on the banks of the river. We watched as a stray bat would swoop down and gobble something up, likely a mosquito or a gnat, before flapping off into the darkness. How I envied those creatures that could fly like she could. It seemed unfair that God would grant such a wonderful life to some, and force the others to watch from the ground.

“I know you’re ignoring me,” I said, the sound of my voice swallowed by the all-encompassing evening around me. I was no more important than the water that kissed my toes beneath me.

She did not respond.

“You don’t have to be so obvious about it,” I snorted, rubbing the back of my hand across my eyes. “It’s kind of embarrassing how you’re pretending not to care.”

I didn’t expect anything from her. I had known her all my life and she had never once spoken to me. The fox in the thicket always told me his best jokes, and the field mice often giggled when I walked their way. The turtles were slow but sweet when they sang their harmonies. The barn cat preened for compliments with her honey-thick voice.

But the owl said nothing. Did she even think of me? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

“I need your advice. If ever there was a moment that I needed you to speak with me, it’s now. I don’t know what to do and I don’t have anyone else to turn to. Can’t you have pity on me?”

She didn’t, of course. Her white feathers ruffled as if in indignation while she clicked her beak.

I sighed as I ran my fingers through my close-cropped hair. “She left me yesterday, you know. She said she didn’t love me anymore. I think I would have liked it better if she had just slapped me. Her parents had told her from the beginning that I wasn’t right for her, and I had agreed. She insisted that I was something special.” I ignored the tears that dripped down my cheeks. “Maybe this all hurts so much because I had just started to believe her, but now that she’s gone, all of my worth seems kind of worthless.”

I felt my hands shaking and tucked them under my thighs to stop it, ignoring the splinters that cut into my knuckles. The pain was perhaps better than what I was feeling right then.

“I need to go, I think. I need to get out of this town. They want no part of me and I don’t want them, either. I can’t keep trying to convince myself to stay when there’s so much more out there. She was the only thing keeping me here, and now she’s gone. What does that leave for me?”

We watched the night grow, ever expanding and twirling, just for us. And yet, not for us at all. What were we but two infinitesimal specks of life, in this world but not of it? I had never been so alone before in my life, and it made me feel like I could float up into the sky at any moment, nothing here to tether me to gravity.

I felt the silence creeping in on me once more and I fought it back with my bare hands. “Owl, what do I do? Do I stay here, or does that just make me a coward?”

With a swift pump of her wings the owl took off, careening into the sky and disturbing the stars that floated on the river’s surface with a slight touch of her wingtip. She was gone before I could even register her absence.

I took her advice.