Möbius, Maria Gelabert

Möbius

There is a ferocity with which the wind whips across your face and hurtles you through the air. Gold feathers cut your cheek and the wax is dripping down your arms, down your back, tracing your veins as your blood drums out a war beat. You’re flailing and falling and all you can see is the sun’s dying flares fragmented across the ocean, shimmering with the steady push and pull of the tide.

There are three doors, isn’t that how it always starts? One leads to hell, one leads to paradise, and one takes you back to the beginning: an extra life, a second chance. Three doors, three possibilities. Now you get to choose.

You’re standing on the window’s ledge and when you look down at the space between you and the water, for the first time, it looks like freedom instead of a cage. Your father is speaking about flying too high; you don’t believe such a thing exists. Outstretching your arms, the feathers glimmer in the sun, and you fall.

You’re in a room with three doors and your father’s voice calls to you from each one. Three doors. You open one. You go back to the start.

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You were someone’s child once, you remember this. You had a father who taught you to make little birds out of paper and send them flying out of the window. You’d laugh and watch them wrestle with the wind. Every time they’d wind up sinking into the sea. From your position, it looked like an escape.

Three doors, three chances, and when you open one to look back to the beginning, you can only see the god-harboring sky and yourself, soaring above.

When the wind catches your golden wings, you can’t help but laugh, and the gods must take it as insolence, as a threat, as a promise that you will never leave these skies, because you get five minutes of undiluted glory before Zeus throws you from his domain. You chase after every trace of sunlight that you can, burning it into your skin. Then the wax starts to slide down your back.

There are three doors and they all lead to the same room. Three doors, and you will always end up here.

You hit the water and feel something collapsing.

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Your ribs are splintering, splitting open to reveal a garden overrun by the desire to keep your wings; a weed that can only grow in the rich black soil of your childish heart.

The current envelops you, its water cool and soothing on your arms where the sun has marked you as its own. The gold feathers drift, blocking the sun’s light. Hello. Bubbles soar from your mouth and wander up towards the sky, towards your father. Hello, hello.

You’re in a room with three doors. You know how this goes.

Maria Gelabert ’15

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