delayed adulthood

what being forced to grow up feels like after years of being overprotected and controlled

flying with borrowed wings

Turn back, but don't fret. Behind you stands a malformed woodland creature with damp and ragged wings standing firm on the ground, rooted to the earth like an ancient stump struck by lightning. Two swollen, blood-bright eyes bulge from its face and roll from your right shoulder to your left, searching you the way the wolf searches a flock, like the king looks at the hidden treasure. Its fingers are violet with old bruises, clenched so tightly around a pair of rusting garden shears that the metal has bitten crescents into its flesh. What happens to the shears so old that they cease to be ordained for fresh roses?

It has come to cut you open, to carve your shoulder blades apart and free the wings buried beneath your skin. Its belly is a hollow cavity like an abandoned well. Its lungs throb visibly beneath parchment flesh. Slimy ropes of gut roll inside a ribcage that grows green algae, and every joint upon its body is a round knotted lump of mass. You shaped it from wet clay. Its face has no mouth, no canine teeth, no sloppy tongue so why do you hear its scream deafen you? Don't think about what you did wrong, think about what you didn't do. Did you take too long to come outside the burning warmth of your house? Did you let the smoke breed inside and choke you or were there no windows in your room?

When were you supposed to learn how to fly? At seventeen? Eighteen? Nineteen? When will you become what you wanted all your life? When will you choose yourself again? Why do you still run so slow? Have you not been running all your life already? Were you too good for your age? The woods are full of children who climbed trees and returned home with dirt beneath their nails, but you got busy cleaning lanterns instead. No wonder your feet drag. No wonder you're short on breath. You burned through so much of yourself becoming tomorrow that there was very little left for today. You fed every hunger but yours. Not a soul cares about what ever you could've been, the corpse of your potential is yours to bury. And what a heavy corpse it is. It fills your pockets with stones. It sleeps beneath your blanket. It is the only God, if God exists.

And while you stumble forward, exhausted and breathless, the thing behind you continues at its teasing pace, carrying its terrible tools through the dark. Sooner or later, you'll grow tired of running too. Sooner or later, your knees will buckle beneath the weight of all the years you spent standing still. When that moment comes, it will lay a bruised hand between your shoulders and carve you open just enough for the wings to emerge.

You are late and forced growth is unnatural. The wounds will be surgical. The flight will be ugly. But the wings will come all the same.

Shh, you're allowed to be angry.

becoming