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Xiao wakes up one morning, lies in his bed and thinks, when did I lose my wings?
He turns onto the side of his hip, leans his cheek against his open palm and thinks. He thinks about something that should be completely improbable, irrational, but so helplessly real. His eyes follow the only bird that’s awake at this hour—the black-feathered mynah with a white beak and a voice as loud as a cry from the heavens, and it watches him back from the branch that it perches on. It chirps, flutters its wings and dances along the thin hand of the branch.
Xiao sighs at the sight of its wings, in the way that the sunlight seems to reflect right off its void blackness, and they look so unbelievably free.
In his dreams, he can fly too. In his dreams, he has soared the vast skies of this world and the worlds that exist past the thin fabric of reality, and he’s happy. He has tasted clouds, and held them in his hands, and he has flown among storms with wings that look like they’re a fragment of space. He stands proud, the entire sun merely a ring around his silhouette and he’s who he’s meant to be.
He’s human and he has never had wings—so why does he feel like he’s lacking them?
This is not the first time he has lied in his bed and felt like there’s something that has unrightfully been ripped out of his grasp, and it seems, with time, the space on his back and the sensation of missing something heavy yet impossibly gentle only grows more unbearable.
There’s nothing he can do to help this feeling. Sometimes, there’s an itch in his back that feels a little too much like a piece of himself being plucked out of bare skin, or the dull ache of heat along his spine during months that are too cool or warm, and of course, the unexplainable scars on his upper back. His mother tells him that the internet will answer his endless questions. The internet tells him that he’s dreaming.
His dreams tell him that they’re the proof of existence.
Xiao flinches as his alarm rings at exactly seven, taking with it what illusion of peace he reserved to himself these past few minutes he was awake. He groans and rolls onto his stomach, patting his hand against his phone until his finger hits the button and stops the awful sound. A few minutes later, he sits up, and when he does, the weight on his back centres itself. He stretches his neck, then his arms, and stands up. He stumbles, supports himself and manages to walk.
There’s nothing behind him, but it’ll always feel like this small room isn’t enough space for someone like him. He’ll always look around the closed walls and worry about his feathers getting caught in the corners, or his wings getting clipped by the ceiling fan when he stands. But there are no wings, or feathers, and they will never emerge from the back of a human boy like him.
Xiao stands in front of the mirror in his bedroom, at the loose pyjamas on his lean frame, then at the dried scars along the length of his arms. He pulls his shirt off gently, just lightly enough to avoid bruising the surface of his skin. He lets out an unsteady breath as he turns around, and right there where they’ve always been, are the scars on his back. Two slits, so finely cut that it could’ve been inflicted on him only by an expert hand, the blood around the edges clotting.
He observes them, then reaches an arm around his body to touch the scars.
He runs his fingers over the rough edges of the cut that will never dry, feeling the wrinkle of skin and the almost moist touch of dried blood. He narrows his eyes, careful not to touch a spot that will ache too badly, and he thinks. He thinks about the life he would have if he could fly—a boy that lingers only by cliffsides and nowhere close to the ground, the light of the burning sun in his eyes and his hair tousled by the wind. He would stray too close to the edges, and he would jump, but he would not fall.
He would fly.
“Xiao-ah, xia lou lai!”
He lowers his hand from the wound, the corners of his lips pulling downward into a frown. He peers at the mynah outside his window, nestled among the leaves and branches and the backdrop of the patchwork sky, and he wishes that he would someday become it.
───────
Like most days, Xiao finds it hard to focus when he’s in school. His assigned seat is at the back corner of his class, where he has only the attention of his deskmate and the birds beyond the glass. He thinks, and he thinks, but never about mathematics or the science of anything but himself—he likes the science of birds. Their wings, and how they fly. How their bodies are carried by the most fragile parts of their skeleton. His shelves at home are filled only with books of winged creatures.
Angels, devils—birds. He likes them all.
Xiao leans his cheek against his folded arms, watching aimlessly at the butterflies that flutter past his view. He observes their translucent wings and the way the sunlight filters through them like it would with stained glass, and there’s a breath-taking beauty in that that he would like to capture for himself. He feels a hollowness in his back where he imagines his own wings would’ve sprouted from. He imagines growing wings would hurt, and learning how to use them would hurt more.
Even if he were to grow wings one day, they might be so heavy that it would crush every bone in his body. By the laws of aviation, something as weighted as him would never be able to fly.
His frown deepens at the thought, and he grimaces to himself, begging for another thought to replace that one in his mind. In the quiet of his individual space, he counts every rise and fall of his chest, every inhale and exhale, until his casual rhythm is interrupted by the drumming of fingers against his table.
He sits up, and looks to his side, where Venti’s looking at him with wide eyes. Oh, Venti, his dear friend with so much life in every ounce of his body, and so much love to spare. It’s sometimes so hard to believe how much time they’re able to spend in each other’s presence even though they’re so, so different. He nudges his head in the direction of the open notebook he has slid halfway onto Xiao’s table.
He looks down at it, lips parted in curiosity, and on the lined pages of the notebook, he sees the drawing of a bird. A bird . He looks at it, and he smiles, because there was no truer joy in anything he has felt than what he is right now. His gaze shifts to the words scribbled beside the tiny thing in a messy, rounded handwriting that’s reminiscent of only one person. Do you want to fly?
I want to fly. I’ll teach you how to fly. I don’t have wings. You don’t need wings to fly, you have me! Really, then what are wings for? I’m your wings. You’re my wings. Yeah. Yeah. Will you follow me to the music room later? Okay. I’ll see you there! Okay.
───────
As soon as the clock strikes twelve and the echo of the lunch bells reverberates through the unoccupied corridors of the school building, a firm hand wraps around his wrist and pulls him out of his chair. Xiao can barely blow his hair out of his face in time before he’s tugged away from his seat and down the corridor by his only friend, led into the music room where they have spent more time growing than anywhere else in the world.
Venti pulls him into a corner of the room that they’ve long claimed as their own, right behind the drum sets and beside the window that holds possibly the best view of the school’s courtyard and the trees surrounding it. Xiao likes it here, because he likes watching the songbirds that line the branches of the gingko trees, and the way they hold their breasts up to the sun to sing with all their lungs.
“You said you’d teach me how to fly,” Xiao tells him, wondering how he’ll do it.
“Show me your wrists,” he says, holding out his open palms. Xiao obeys him quietly, placing his wrists in the gentle grasp of Venti’s hands, and watching as his fingers close around them. He listens to the worldly sounds of birds chirping and footsteps echoing through the hallways, focusing on so much yet nothing at once as the nimble touch of a thumb brushes in search of the vein within which is the evidence of his living. “Breathe with me, okay? And listen. Listen to our hearts.”
Xiao looks at him, not really understanding what he means, but Venti closes his eyes, so he does the same. He closes his eyes, and he listens for something, for something out there. He hears the children playing in the courtyard below, and the bouncing of a ball, and laughter—so much laughter—but he’s not listening. He catches onto the melody of their hearts coming together, and this feels a little more like listening, so he relaxes and he drifts with the sound.
Breathe with me, his friend’s voice seemed to have invaded his mind. And listen.
And he feels it, deep in his bones. In his blood. In his spirit.
He feels the echo of the wind, the whistle of a breeze, and he can imagine the way it rises up the slopes of a hill and passes over the canopies of a forest. He feels the air in his bones, the air that’s all around him and everywhere in the world—the air that he breathes in and breathes out, and is the enabler of all life. Here, as he’s experiencing the thrill of air rushing around him and the thrill of what it might be to fly, he realises this is as pleasant as he always hoped soaring would be.
He’s grounded, but he feels like he could never reach farther heights. There’s a song thrumming at the edges of his fingertips and the base of his throat. It seeps into his blood through the pores of his skin and hums as it circulates through his body. Xiao cracks his eye open and finds his friend in front of him, his hair in disarray like it’d been blown by a gust of strong wind and eyes clamped shut. His heart aches. It sores. It cries.
He hears, feels it in his wrists and in a chest that’s not his own and oh, this is life.
───────
“Turn around,” Venti tells him when they’re in the art room one day. A week after he learned how to fly.
They shouldn’t be here, because neither of them are in the painting club and the only teacher in the faculty doesn’t take lightly to students sneaking into the only studio in the school building. But Venti’s adamant on revealing whatever he has to show, and Xiao, after years of their friendship, still can’t talk him out of bad ideas.
Xiao stands in the face of the complete disarray that the art studio has been left in—the scrap pieces of paper on the floor, the scissors and glue left open on the ground, the flowers, and apple peels and apple cores, the faint sliver of orange light seeping in through the window, but he doesn’t feel uneasy. He takes another cautious step into the mess, wondering what could possibly be here for him to see. Maybe it’s something he’s not meant to see, because Venti soon grabs him by the shoulder and turns him around.
“Close your eyes,” he says. Xiao obeys.
He closes his eyes, and he waits, back facing the chaos behind him. Then, he feels a gentle tug on his shirt, and he can tell during the second attempt that Venti’s trying to pull his shirt off. “Stop it,” he says, voice clipped, because there’s no reason for him to remove his shirt right here, when they already risk the possibility of being caught fully clothed.
“Nobody’s in school right now,” Venti pouts. “Come on, just trust me. Pretty please?”
Xiao reluctantly agrees, and unbuttons his shirt down to his abdomen. He shrugs the fabric off his shoulders and lets it fall to his hips. He looks straight ahead, because Venti won’t let him figure out what he’s up to until he’s done it, and he notices the plush penguins sitting among the pile of apple peels and white lilies. Some time later, a hand holds his shoulder for support and presses something into his back. He looks over his shoulder, inhaling harshly when a tactile warmth ghosts over his scars. “Venti—”
“Trust me,” he assures. “Trust me, okay? I won’t hurt you.”
His shoulders relax. He closes his eyes, and holds himself together as something sticky is pressed against his back—something like glue, but much kinder than that. He straightens his back and it’s upon this simple movement that he’s made aware of the new weight on his back, the barely noticeable heaviness of something depending on his strength to be held.
Xiao tenses up at the sensation. “Venti,” he stammers, scared. Anxious.
“Look in the mirror,” Venti whispers against his bare skin.
Xiao looks over his shoulder, at the mirror at the other side of the room, and oh. His eyes gloss over the strokes of ink against the makeshift wings, and he recognises an attempt to imitate feathers. He chokes up at the sight of his back that’s no longer lacking—the paper wings that have made a home out of that emptiness. They’ll never fit him like real wings would, and right now, there are many things that don’t feel quite like they do in the dreams, but for as long as these paper wings here, and physical, he can pretend they’re just right.
“Venti,” he says, incredulous. Loving. “Venti,” he says again, with tears in his eyes, and he learns what it’s like to fall for the first time since he’s learnt how to fly.
───────
“Can I tell you a story?” Venti asks, looking at him. His hand is wrapped around Xiao’s pinky in their own intimate way of hand-holding, and their shoulders are bumping together as they walk. He could talk about anything, and Xiao would listen. He knows, and he doesn’t usually ask, but he does today.
Xiao nods, looking at him too. By the time he turns his head, his friend is already looking at the ground. He doesn’t usually look at the ground, because of how much more he likes the rest of the world. Venti likes looking at the vast blue sky, and the ochre spread of gingko leaves, and the cacophonous colours of everything above the ground. They’ve always shared an interest in the realm above, the one that exists just out of reach.
“Once upon a time,” he starts.
“Is that how all your stories have to start?”
“Listen to me!” Venti chides, bumping into his shoulder. The tips of Xiao’s ears flush as he looks sheepishly at their intertwined hands and smiles, amused. “So, a long time ago, when the only people that roamed the world were gods, there was magic. Not the kind of magic that we know, the kind that makes rabbits disappear from hats or any of that stuff. The kind of magic that could bring a person back to life, or put them to rest forever. During that time, there was a you, and there was a me.”
Xiao raises an eyebrow in question. “There couldn’t be. There’s only one of you and one of me.”
“But there was a life between us before this one,” Venti tells him, and he says it with so much certainty, it’s as though he has figured out the truth of the universe within his fifteen years of living. Some dedicate their entire lives to the study of life, but the only one surer than them is a boy whose eyes hold a twinkle of confidence that are as undeniable as stars. “We existed before this world, you know? We existed in many worlds. We were around when they used to travel on horses, and before aeroplanes were a thing. And back then, you know what we were? I was a god, and you were just as good as one. I was winged, and you were winged—”
“—did we fly?”
“—oh yes, we loved to fly,” Venti grins, turning around so they’re facing each other on the sidewalk. He clasps his hands around Xiao’s, and he leans forward with such genuinity in his expression, it’s as though the entire world revolves around him. It’s one of those moments when Xiao experiences an utter inability to muster anything he wants to stay, because all thoughts in his mind come to a screeching halt and in the same way he loves birds, he feels like he loves Venti. “More than that, I loved watching you fly.”
“I was winged, back then?” Xiao gapes. “What did they look like?”
“They were big, and bold, and black like a raven’s wings,” Venti explains, and while everything he’s saying can’t be anything but a lie, there’s an unshakeable feeling in his core that hits him like it’s the truth. The only truth that he’s searching for his entire life. “They looked so good on you. They wouldn’t look better on anyone else.”
“And yours?”
“Mine were white, and delicate, like a dove’s,” he smiles. “You know, back then, I liked one thing better than being a god. And you liked one thing better than flying. Do you know what?”
Xiao furrows his eyebrows. One thing better than flying?
“Us,” his smile widens. “We liked each other very, very much.”