Page 1 of Where Broken Wings Fly

1

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At some point in my life, I stopped looking for the light.

It wasn’t as if I woke one morning and gave up on ridding myself of the cloak of dread around my neck. It was subtle shifts that under any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have noticed.

It was driving by a sinking sun beyond the horizon and not feeling my chest warm as gold light spilled across the earth. It was sitting in my childhood home during a holiday meal, my loved ones laughing around me and feeling my eyes go glossy as I slipped into the abyss of my mind. It was walking by the piling dishes in my sink or the two bags of garbage I had stashed by the front door for over a week.

Really, it all came down to this: existing in a world that was larger than me but seemed to shrink every day, the walls of my life closing in and leaving me curled over in the corner.

Depression, the professionals called it.

A corpse with a heartbeat and bills, I called it.

I wasn’t drowning in that bottomless pool all by myself, though. I had Charlotte – my lifelong friend who had chained herself to my wrists and rode every bump in the road at my side.

The clouds cast over me grew denser and darker the day that she died. It was that day that I stopped believing there was a light to chase altogether, the day that I laughed at myself for ever believing such a thing to exist. So as I sat in silence at her funeral and let myself seep deeper into the pit of tar beneath me, I was content to accept my life as it was.

Life carried on, like life does. Until I received a slip of mail in my post-box, addressed to one Olivia Loughty and sealed with a solicitors stamp. Within it, Charlotte’s dying wish – her task that she had entrusted to me, and me alone.

What I was sure Charlotte didn’t know, what I would one day tell her when we met again, was that not only did that letter set me on the path to find the light once more, but that it would help halo me in it for the rest of my life.

~

It began in London.

I had signed up for a cross-country tour offered by a low-revenue travelling company. The name of the tour was something like Hillsides and History or Solitude in the Sights. The name itself wasn’t what caught my eye, it was the fact that for a measly couple-hundred pounds, I would not only have travel sorted but shelter in the form of run-down motels. A bed was a bed, after all.

I loaded the coach early Monday morning in London after arguing with the tour-guide that my name was indeed Olivia, that the online ticket-booking service had only allowed me to use four characters which was why it read Liv, instead. Only after begrudgingly giving him an extra twenty pounds so that he could “verify this information”, I was given access to the stingy vehicle. Finding a place in the farthest bench from the driver as I could, I slumped down into my seat and awaited our arrival in Stonehenge.

The whole drive there I listened as my phone pinged, over and over, from where I had stashed it in my pocket. There was no point in pulling it out, I already knew what would be waiting for me on my screen. An onslaught of texts from my brother, updating me about the little things in his life that he had and I didn’t. Likely a text or two from my boss, gossiping about how the clinic was falling apart without me. And if I was lucky, another text or two from my parents explaining to me that taking the train and skipping the tourist-trap that was a travelling agency would have been “wiser”. For all of those reasons, I reached into my pocket and flipped the device to silent, content with letting it buzz until it died.

The tour-guide, a man well into the second half of his life with enough grease in his grey-hair to be considered a fire hazard, rose from his seat in the front.

“We are approaching Stonehenge. This will be our first stop before we hit the motorway. Those who wish to view, proceed to prepare yourself for arrival.”

He sounded about as joyful as I did day-in, day-out. As I worked at tucking my one bag beneath my seat, I watched a large group of Americans shoot upright, unfiltered excitement radiating their faces just as the sun began to peek up from the hillside beyond. It was with envy that I watched them huddle together, love for one another and thrill for the day ahead beating their every step towards the front of the coach.

Whispering a beyond-grave insult to Charlotte, I pulled at one of the small pouches within my backpack and tucked the pendant full of some of her ashes into my pocket.

Of all the things she could have asked me to do for her, travelling the country to deposit essences of Charlotte back into the earth was the last thing I had expected.

~

Stonehenge was stunning.

Even with the continuous black smog over my mind, I was able to appreciate the raw beauty of such a relic. The circular design of the stones that towered above me, seeming to stretch up to the heavens, was enough to remind me how small my problems truly were.

While the tour-guide — Evan — rattled off a thousand facts in an octave I recognized as bored, I cast my eyes up to the sky. Some divine being had removed rain from our forecast for the remainder of the week. I almost wanted to credit it to Charlotte, but if she knew what I was doing she would have ensured that it thundered for the entirety of my trip for her. She had a cruel sense of humour, in a way.

Once I finished soaking in the heat of the sun and the blanket of blue above me, I slipped behind one of the stones, pulled the pendant from my neck, and got to work. Cracking open the compartment within the black jewel, I watched as her dusted remains spread across the sea of green grass beneath me, and then tucked the pendant itself against the nearest hedge. There, Charlotte would remain for the rest of time. Unless some asshole stole the necklace, which was a real possibility.

I was compelled to consider crying. Not because I could feel it bubbling up my throat, but because I knew it would be human of me to cry as I let a little piece of my best friend go. But that was the thing about depression, the veil between myself and reality grew so thick that a numbness took root in my chest, until I felt the same at weddings as I did at funerals.

Instead of shedding a tear for Charlotte, I closed my eyes and let one of my fondest memories lapse behind my eyelids until Evan blew his obnoxious whistle and yanked me back to the present.

“Site one done, you grumpy git,” I whispered to the hedge with a smile on my face.