You Need Wings To Fly

• Cobey Grant, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2011

It’s amazing how you can miss someone’s presence, their shadow, their smell, their laugh and their voice. Or how you can be so self-involved that you don’t realize how much they mean to you until they are so far gone that you can barely remember what they looked like. What you do remember though is the way that person treated you, the special relationship you shared. Life is so precious to us, yet we take it for granted. Life is like money; you don’t realize what you could have done with it until it’s almost all gone and then you contemplate the few times you spent it in worthwhile ways.

At thirteen years of age you have no idea how amazing willpower can be until you see someone lying in an ICU hospital bed so full of hospital-regulated drugs that they have no sense of what is happening around them, yet somehow they still seem to be breathing, fighting; holding onto the precious thread of life. It’s hard to tell really if they’re still in there at all. Life constantly surprises me; like how quickly someone can be snatched off the face of the Earth…

Corridors, lots of corridors, some filled with important men and women in uniform. Some are empty apart from the rare groups of sombre faces, some with groups of sobbing people huddled together, and some that are completely deserted. There is so much to see. But it is not what you see that counts; it is what you hear and what you feel. Like the two lovers in a quiet courtyard telling each other over and over that they love each other and how much they mean to each other, like the crowds of visitors in the dining room discussing the weather, Michael Jackson’s death or the birth of a new baby. Life goes on.

Sometimes, if you are still, you can hear the quiet breaths from dark rooms seeping from the barely living beings into dimly lit passage ways. At other times you feel the elation and the sense of wonder of couples as they pass you by in the corridors with their beautiful bundles of new life wrapped in baby blankets and cradled lovingly in their arms; then you know that this place, this world, not only inflicts great sadness upon us but generates great hope and happiness… and they exist simultaneously in the same moment.

Walls, walls are the boundaries we place around ourselves. We limit ourselves; we place barriers around ourselves and restrict ourselves to certain ways of thinking. Walls, metaphoric and real, surround me, everywhere. There are so many rooms and hallways that one could easily become lost, but I know where I’m going: Level 4, Ward B…

Cancer is like a parasite. Once it has had a taste of you it can’t let you go. It eats away at your insides and devours your life force slowly, so slowly that sometimes it lulls you into a false sense of security and just when you think you have escaped it, it starts devouring you so much faster that you have no chance of stopping it. If you rebel against it with chemo, it seems that the cancer will come back twice as hard. It is unforgiving and merciless and few survive. My grandfather was one of the unlucky ones, or was he one of the lucky ones? He developed Mantle Cell Lymphoma, which is an aggressive form of cancer that moves quickly and is usually discovered in the advanced fourth stage and by then it is almost unstoppable. Mantle Cell Lymphoma is persistent and never gives up the fight to consume its victim. You can prevent it temporarily, through chemotherapy, stem cell transplants and bone marrow transplants, but this cancer is relentless...it holds on tenaciously until you no longer have the strength to fight it.

Dead silence. Not a sound, not a movement except the drip, drip, drip of the intravenous line and the continuous mechanical breaths of the oxygen machine...

White surrounds me. White the colour of purity but to me it is the colour of sickness and death. White walls, white lights, white sheets and white pillow cases even... white skin.

Nothing is as it seems. Nothing is nothing, yet it is not. Something is something, yet it is not. Happiness is happiness or is it just a mask for sadness or a drug to keep away the pain and loneliness? Sadness is sadness, or is it just a façade to cover a broken soul? Evil is evil, or is it just an opinion? Is a smile a smile, or is it more? Is a tear a tear, or is it more?

Sometimes in your life you feel as though there is a glass wall separating you from the rest of the world. Time slows down- you see your life like scenes in a movie. You feel as if you are different from everyone else because you have been changed by your experiences, challenges and tragedies. Your life seems as though it has turned upside down and everything seems wrong and unjust but somehow, out of the blue you seem to adjust and no matter what life throws at you, you take it in your stride and that...that is what makes you different. Your world may be crashing down around you and you may be bearing a heavy burden upon your shoulders, but you continue to stand tall with your head held high and fight your way through the ruins of your life because nothing can stop you from living or drown out the laughter or smother the life bursting out of you.

Life sometimes feels like it is too hard and too confusing. Some people try and find a way out of their complicated web of life but they end up more tangled and only one escape option, from their point of view, is left: Death in the form of suicide. Some people sit there in one spot for most of their lives and watch the world go by and only when they look back on their web of life do they realize how messed up and tangled it is. They wonder how it got that way, where they went wrong. But what they don’t realize is that by sitting there and not doing anything with their lives has actually caused the mess and the people they love are suffering because of them and they try to repair the damage they have caused.

Others are less fortunate; they are born into a tangled, violent web and endure extreme cruelty or they endure extreme poverty with no one ever wanting to acknowledge their existence. They are forever hoping and dreaming of a way out. They wish to start again from scratch but have never been taught the ways of the world so they have no real hope or idea of how to start again. All they know is what their parents have taught them: secrecy, tangles, deception, violence, confusion and hurt. A small group of people, no matter how tangled, confusing and screwed-up their lives seem, can escape the sticky, entanglement of their lives to stop and try to make a difference in the world, at times, just repairing a single thread of someone else’s web to lighten their load. No one escapes life with a perfect web; everyone has a tangled thread, a mistake or a single severed thread. We are like spiders. We spin our webs, we use them as weapons to suck the life out of others and then we expect them to still be perfect.

"Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass... it is about learning to dance in the rain”. I’ve realized that you can’t stand around waiting for your pain and sadness to wash away you actually have to get out and do something about it. You have to find strength from adversity and learn to see the dazzling sun through the storm clouds.

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have." Sometimes in life you have to carry a load that weighs more than you do, you have to shoulder the pain and continue walking forwards with your head held high because so many people depend on you to carry your pack. Sometimes others have to lean on you because they are not strong enough to stand, let alone walk by themselves. You never let your pain or weakness show, because you would not only be letting yourself down, but you would be letting the other person down, kind of like Simpson and his Donkey. You may think that you are hard done by, but the person you are supporting is in a far worse condition. Sometimes you have to bear these burdens in silence and without verbal recognition but some things are acknowledged but not commented on. People watch what you do but not always do they tell you that they saw you.

Sometimes I think that I jinxed my family and other times I think it was just a coincidence. I remember, when I was in year seven, saying that no-one in my family had cancer and at that time it seemed like everyone else’s family had at least one person who had cancer, I thought I was so lucky . Little, did I know...

“Move on. It is just a chapter in the past. But don’t close the book, just turn the page” The story of life never ends, not even in death because there is always someone to carry on the story. Every story ends but in life every end is just a new beginning.

I remember it clearly as though I was walking in a dream. A waking dream. I saw my entire life flash before me – not a dying flash but a reflective flash of how my life used to be and how it would never be again. It was the 2nd of November 2009. I will never forget that day; the day the angels took my Grandfather and flew home. He was free.

That Monday changed my life and altered me in a way that nothing else could. It was the day that God took my Grandfather away from me. Everything I hoped for was gone, like him seeing me graduate or going to my wedding. I remember feeling so sad. Everyone had been surprised at how Grandad had been taken away from us. Who really knows? There is a saying, “Of all things HOPE dies last”. That was true for me and for that I am glad.

I think that my Grandad’s funeral was the hardest thing I have ever had to go through. Grandad’s brother had come over from New Zealand and he was crying the whole way through because he thought that he would be the first brother to pass away. He was the eldest, Grandad was the youngest. My uncle was next to me and he was so close to crying and I could see that he didn’t want to so I started making fun of the choir with him and we laughed so hard, but so quietly. It is strange how laughter can save you in many situations and sometimes all you can do is laugh to keep yourself from crying. I remember walking out of the church with my Great Uncle Bill, supporting him so that he wouldn’t fall because he was so upset and shaking. I cried the whole way through the ceremony at the cemetery and I couldn’t stop myself. It was one of the few times I was so out of control that I lost myself and I was lost for months. I look back now and I know that I am stronger for it.

Life will never be the same and if it hadn’t changed I wouldn’t know any different. I’ve realized that I can’t change the things I’ve said, the things I’ve done or the things I haven’t. All I can change is what I will say or do now and in the future because that is what separates us from who we are, who we were or who we will be.

If you help a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis the blood from its body is never forced into its wings and therefore it cannot fly. It is the butterflies’ battle that gives it the strength to fly. I am like the butterfly, I have had to battle and this is what has enabled me to find the joy in life and to appreciate all that it gives me, both the challenges and the blessings. It’s time for me to spread my wings and fly.