“Don’t fly too near to the sun,” he had warned me,
as he strapped the wings across my eager back.
“I won’t. It will be fine,” I said, planting two feet on the ledge.
Looking down, I saw the swirling darkness of the world.
I swallowed down my fear.
But inside me, a sunbeam yearned to break free, to fly away.
To fly to an oasis in the clouds.

“Wax and feathers,” he told me, “that’s all it is.”
That’s all it is.
That’s all it ever was, all it ever shall be.
Wax and feathers.

The sky had called me by name,
and as I flew above the withering old artificer
who outstretched his ancient hand in a gesture of goodbye,
I knew I would never again see the face of men.
Only the faces of angels.
Of gods and goddesses.

The wings had lent my body a buoyancy
that I never knew had existed in the world.
Wax and feathers.
I danced and pranced and swirled and twirled into the sky,
all feelings of weight and import gone.
I had left the world behind.
I traded it all for a bit of wax and some feathers.

The feeling of bliss began to melt as soon as the wings did.
Panic struck me in the skies,
and as I looked below me I saw everything there ever was.
Everything that ever shall be.
I struggled to keep the flame alive within me.
But I fell.
Like Lucifer to the bowels of Hell,
I fell.

I ripped through clouds,
madly spinning in the air.
I glanced towards the sun above me,
growing smaller with every passing moment.
I prayed.
For the first time in my life, I prayed.

I could feel the Earth rising up to meet me.
“This is it,” I thought.
“This is wax and feathers.”
I closed my eyes.
Imagined what the old man would have said.
And I made peace.

But to my surprise, when I opened my eyes,
I was being held to the breast of an angel.
A winged figure of ineffable beauty.
I was flying with her, this perfect creation,
this embodiment of purity and divinity.
In her soft eyes I saw the moon and stars,
all eternity and space stretched out before me
in long pools of silver and white.
Her glowing golden hair was not of the world I knew,
but rather crafted out of the sun itself.
It lent light to everything.
A wave of euphoria passed over me when she
turned her gaze upon me, the human boy
in her merciful grasp, and smiled.

I belong to her.

Never again will I play with wax and feathers.