(CREATIVE NONFICTION)
ICARUS WITH ALUMINUM WINGS
ANDREA BIANCHI
ICARUS WITH ALUMINUM WINGS
ANDREA BIANCHI
At the end of the moon’s current journey around the earth, the man who did not fall in love with me here in our hometown will rise up and circle half the globe on his way to a new life in a different town.
I should have anticipated he would move away, after he postponed our first date in Chicago for a trip to Lebanon. “And I should tell you,” he texted—as if warning me to beware before we finally met on the Ides of March last year—“I just returned from three years of living as a journalist in Istanbul.” He had stories of befriending militants in his Turkish neighborhood, of feeding monkeys in his remote village in India. And later he had photos—and sporadic phone calls—when he left me, a patient Penelope, for his months-long odysseys to the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem and Prague, the turquoise beaches of Croatia and Albania, the markets with orange-yolked eggs in sunny Portugal, the bars with liquor flaming like a solar flare at midnight in Ukraine.
I consulted maps surreptitiously, trying to target his ever-changing time zones, embarrassed at the geographical knowledge I had lost since childhood, when I would spin my family’s globe beneath my fingers, flying over the vast oceans like an airplane on the spinning wind, or wandering across the bumpy topography of the mountain ranges. But always I would land on Greenland, the one tolerable location I had selected in some sort of bargain with a cruel God, who surely would demand I take his gospel to faraway lands someday. I had glimpsed those perilous locales, with their strange cuisines and indecipherable languages, in slideshows presented by visiting missionaries in the dark Wednesday night prayer meetings of my family’s church. They had been young and eager—likely excited to see the world on the tithes of Midwesterners tricked into believing in their mission, and in God. But I had envisioned those saintly servants as various Nate Saints, doomed to almost certain cannibalistic sacrifice under the jungle sun. And I believed its burning could only be escaped in, exchanged for, the chill of the Greenland snow.
Perhaps this anticipation of icy banishment solidified my appreciation for the familiars of home. For Saturday mornings with my cat pressed into my lap in an overstuffed chair. For coffee in a brown drip-ware mug and an IKEA catalogue, its thick pillows and comforters filled with feathers I would use to construct a nest, instead of wings.
Because I still fear flying too close to the sun. Plummeting into the Atlantic in a flimsy fuselage. And even with Xanax to brave the plane, I would not know how to navigate the endless other dangers alone across the globe. Turning down a maze of narrow European streets into the part of town where a naïve American woman should not go alone.
I am out of step, I know. Left behind. Because travel, often solitary, is now synonymous with personal worth. It promises, like some sort of religion, to assist in arriving at one’s identity. It is this generation’s cultural revolution. And in pursuit of this new status symbol of self-actualization, online influencers and their followers, my boyfriend traveling in their midst, conspicuously consume elaborate breakfasts in bed in sundrenched Airbnbs overlooking Moroccan temples and the Eiffel Tower. While I, beneath the heavy blankets of my bed, beside the old chest that holds my stiff unopened passport in a drawer, watch from the tiny window of my phone.
I posted my own filtered photos of New York City last fall, when I borrowed my boyfriend’s expertise in flight itineraries and subway systems to attempt my first trip in years. “I want to see who I am and how I feel in the city,” I prattled as we planned. I expected some fabled kind of self-discovery, the broadening of the mind celebrated smugly by my friends who had studied abroad in France or Italy. What occurred instead was a narrowing. “Chicago feels small,” I told my boyfriend later, its streets limited after Manhattan’s endless concrete canyons, which he had urged me peer down during every yellow taxi ride. Gray smog now tarnished my city’s public art and parks. And it crept into the ornate old theaters that had once opened their curtains to me, like long-time lovers undressing, to reveal their drama and songs.
What had happened to my joy when I first signed the binding deed to my tiny apartment in Chicago’s center, where varied languages swirled like white noise on the sidewalks below? When I saw the city’s wonder continually anew through the eyes of tourists pointing up to the sun-tinged skyscrapers and photographing in awe? When I knew that what they only envied, I owned.
A perpetual tourist, my boyfriend could not comprehend my fixity. “I like to experience new people and places,” he said. Travel not for self-discovery, but for other-discovery. Yet without the locals who take pride in their home, would he have anything to travel to? Travelers only view, passively consume, the beauty and culture that inhabitants actually create. Blessed are the stay-ers, for they shall sustain the earth.
Maybe stay, I told him, and stop running from the self that follows you everywhere anyway. Maybe make a home in the country that migrants and refugees, those most unwilling of travelers, are literally dying to attain. Maybe put down roots into the bedrock of this globe and grow.
But no one seems to want to stop anymore. Someone who stays, in spite of non-stop flights and left-right swipes, is someone stuck—in a city or in a relationship. “People nowadays drift in and out of relationships,” my boyfriend told me when I asked for exclusivity, longevity. “They come together, travel through life for a little while, and then go their separate ways.”
Of course, airplane lavatories and hotel rooms have always been the playground of the business-everyman, with the moon-white strip of skin on the finger once occupied by his pocketed golden wedding band. And was not Calypso’s island but a tropical escape from Odysseus’s immobile wooden marriage bed? Travel has always been a seductive affair. Now, though, men announce their penchant for leaving like an achievement in character. “Always on the move,” my boyfriend’s dating profile read. “Looking to fill another passport,” others boast. “50 countries and counting.” So it is a short leap—a mere puddle-jumper of a flight—to infer their plans for moving on to another woman, another bed. 100 hookups and counting.
“Blessed is he who leaves,” says a character in Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. The book is an homage to wandering, translated, transatlantically, into English recently. And after seeing the soaring reviews, wanting to understand the lure of leaving that would take my lover from me, I requested a library e-copy—that favorite format of the traveler, who cannot be burdened with bags of paperbacks. I was sent to the back of a waiting list as long as an airport security line. Everyone wanted to take flight.
But when the novel finally arced its airy way through the Internet and landed on the screen in my lap, I learned the prophetess who blesses the leavers is actually unstable. Her mind sways as precariously as her bedraggled body, teetering outside a subway stop as she hurls unintelligible mutterings, the scriptures of some secretive cult, at commuters hurrying home. She is homeless, too, as unmoored as the novel’s peripatetic narrator, who possesses almost no personal anecdotes, no narrative arc spanning the map of her life. Instead, she is condemned to merely retelling others’ disconnected tales, like flights diverted haphazardly by the whims of sputtering engines or indecisive winds. Never grounded anywhere long enough to start, to finish, a story of her own.
“Is somewhere else always the right place?” an airline ad asked me at a bus stop recently. Instead of waiting, standing here, would you not rather take the bus to the subway to your boyfriend’s apartment, for just a few more weeks, in Logan Square? And instead of there, would he not rather be on the train tracks with his bags packed for O’Hare? Then on to Iceland, paused like a stationary moon beneath the shadow of Greenland and its snow. Then over to his new home in Berlin. But even there, the airline admen, like all-knowing solar deities, whispered to me, he will want to soar up toward the sun again to somewhere new.
“Let your lovers go, like birds, to fly free,” I admonished myself during one of his trips last summer, in a note in the airy margins of my e-reader. I rediscovered it there not long ago, beside a line in “Christmas Sparrow” in a book of Billy Collins’s poems. “I trapped its pulsations in a shirt,” the poet says of the bird brought indoors by his cat. And “outside, when I uncupped my hands, / it burst into its element.”
So on the upcoming evening when my no-longer boyfriend once again unfolds his aluminum wings, he, too, will arc away from the hands I would wrap around him like the feathery blanket on my couch. And I will sink into its pillows alone, surrounded by the trappings of my home: The solid high-rises pressed against my building’s walls. My potted plant with its need for weekly watering. The heavy antique table anchoring the center of the room. And my cat, weighted with thick belly and long fur, will peer out through the gridded bars of the window screen at the last of the summer’s silver-winged seagulls, rising up into the globe of the moonless sky.
I should have anticipated he would move away, after he postponed our first date in Chicago for a trip to Lebanon. “And I should tell you,” he texted—as if warning me to beware before we finally met on the Ides of March last year—“I just returned from three years of living as a journalist in Istanbul.” He had stories of befriending militants in his Turkish neighborhood, of feeding monkeys in his remote village in India. And later he had photos—and sporadic phone calls—when he left me, a patient Penelope, for his months-long odysseys to the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem and Prague, the turquoise beaches of Croatia and Albania, the markets with orange-yolked eggs in sunny Portugal, the bars with liquor flaming like a solar flare at midnight in Ukraine.
I consulted maps surreptitiously, trying to target his ever-changing time zones, embarrassed at the geographical knowledge I had lost since childhood, when I would spin my family’s globe beneath my fingers, flying over the vast oceans like an airplane on the spinning wind, or wandering across the bumpy topography of the mountain ranges. But always I would land on Greenland, the one tolerable location I had selected in some sort of bargain with a cruel God, who surely would demand I take his gospel to faraway lands someday. I had glimpsed those perilous locales, with their strange cuisines and indecipherable languages, in slideshows presented by visiting missionaries in the dark Wednesday night prayer meetings of my family’s church. They had been young and eager—likely excited to see the world on the tithes of Midwesterners tricked into believing in their mission, and in God. But I had envisioned those saintly servants as various Nate Saints, doomed to almost certain cannibalistic sacrifice under the jungle sun. And I believed its burning could only be escaped in, exchanged for, the chill of the Greenland snow.
Perhaps this anticipation of icy banishment solidified my appreciation for the familiars of home. For Saturday mornings with my cat pressed into my lap in an overstuffed chair. For coffee in a brown drip-ware mug and an IKEA catalogue, its thick pillows and comforters filled with feathers I would use to construct a nest, instead of wings.
Because I still fear flying too close to the sun. Plummeting into the Atlantic in a flimsy fuselage. And even with Xanax to brave the plane, I would not know how to navigate the endless other dangers alone across the globe. Turning down a maze of narrow European streets into the part of town where a naïve American woman should not go alone.
I am out of step, I know. Left behind. Because travel, often solitary, is now synonymous with personal worth. It promises, like some sort of religion, to assist in arriving at one’s identity. It is this generation’s cultural revolution. And in pursuit of this new status symbol of self-actualization, online influencers and their followers, my boyfriend traveling in their midst, conspicuously consume elaborate breakfasts in bed in sundrenched Airbnbs overlooking Moroccan temples and the Eiffel Tower. While I, beneath the heavy blankets of my bed, beside the old chest that holds my stiff unopened passport in a drawer, watch from the tiny window of my phone.
I posted my own filtered photos of New York City last fall, when I borrowed my boyfriend’s expertise in flight itineraries and subway systems to attempt my first trip in years. “I want to see who I am and how I feel in the city,” I prattled as we planned. I expected some fabled kind of self-discovery, the broadening of the mind celebrated smugly by my friends who had studied abroad in France or Italy. What occurred instead was a narrowing. “Chicago feels small,” I told my boyfriend later, its streets limited after Manhattan’s endless concrete canyons, which he had urged me peer down during every yellow taxi ride. Gray smog now tarnished my city’s public art and parks. And it crept into the ornate old theaters that had once opened their curtains to me, like long-time lovers undressing, to reveal their drama and songs.
What had happened to my joy when I first signed the binding deed to my tiny apartment in Chicago’s center, where varied languages swirled like white noise on the sidewalks below? When I saw the city’s wonder continually anew through the eyes of tourists pointing up to the sun-tinged skyscrapers and photographing in awe? When I knew that what they only envied, I owned.
A perpetual tourist, my boyfriend could not comprehend my fixity. “I like to experience new people and places,” he said. Travel not for self-discovery, but for other-discovery. Yet without the locals who take pride in their home, would he have anything to travel to? Travelers only view, passively consume, the beauty and culture that inhabitants actually create. Blessed are the stay-ers, for they shall sustain the earth.
Maybe stay, I told him, and stop running from the self that follows you everywhere anyway. Maybe make a home in the country that migrants and refugees, those most unwilling of travelers, are literally dying to attain. Maybe put down roots into the bedrock of this globe and grow.
But no one seems to want to stop anymore. Someone who stays, in spite of non-stop flights and left-right swipes, is someone stuck—in a city or in a relationship. “People nowadays drift in and out of relationships,” my boyfriend told me when I asked for exclusivity, longevity. “They come together, travel through life for a little while, and then go their separate ways.”
Of course, airplane lavatories and hotel rooms have always been the playground of the business-everyman, with the moon-white strip of skin on the finger once occupied by his pocketed golden wedding band. And was not Calypso’s island but a tropical escape from Odysseus’s immobile wooden marriage bed? Travel has always been a seductive affair. Now, though, men announce their penchant for leaving like an achievement in character. “Always on the move,” my boyfriend’s dating profile read. “Looking to fill another passport,” others boast. “50 countries and counting.” So it is a short leap—a mere puddle-jumper of a flight—to infer their plans for moving on to another woman, another bed. 100 hookups and counting.
“Blessed is he who leaves,” says a character in Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. The book is an homage to wandering, translated, transatlantically, into English recently. And after seeing the soaring reviews, wanting to understand the lure of leaving that would take my lover from me, I requested a library e-copy—that favorite format of the traveler, who cannot be burdened with bags of paperbacks. I was sent to the back of a waiting list as long as an airport security line. Everyone wanted to take flight.
But when the novel finally arced its airy way through the Internet and landed on the screen in my lap, I learned the prophetess who blesses the leavers is actually unstable. Her mind sways as precariously as her bedraggled body, teetering outside a subway stop as she hurls unintelligible mutterings, the scriptures of some secretive cult, at commuters hurrying home. She is homeless, too, as unmoored as the novel’s peripatetic narrator, who possesses almost no personal anecdotes, no narrative arc spanning the map of her life. Instead, she is condemned to merely retelling others’ disconnected tales, like flights diverted haphazardly by the whims of sputtering engines or indecisive winds. Never grounded anywhere long enough to start, to finish, a story of her own.
“Is somewhere else always the right place?” an airline ad asked me at a bus stop recently. Instead of waiting, standing here, would you not rather take the bus to the subway to your boyfriend’s apartment, for just a few more weeks, in Logan Square? And instead of there, would he not rather be on the train tracks with his bags packed for O’Hare? Then on to Iceland, paused like a stationary moon beneath the shadow of Greenland and its snow. Then over to his new home in Berlin. But even there, the airline admen, like all-knowing solar deities, whispered to me, he will want to soar up toward the sun again to somewhere new.
“Let your lovers go, like birds, to fly free,” I admonished myself during one of his trips last summer, in a note in the airy margins of my e-reader. I rediscovered it there not long ago, beside a line in “Christmas Sparrow” in a book of Billy Collins’s poems. “I trapped its pulsations in a shirt,” the poet says of the bird brought indoors by his cat. And “outside, when I uncupped my hands, / it burst into its element.”
So on the upcoming evening when my no-longer boyfriend once again unfolds his aluminum wings, he, too, will arc away from the hands I would wrap around him like the feathery blanket on my couch. And I will sink into its pillows alone, surrounded by the trappings of my home: The solid high-rises pressed against my building’s walls. My potted plant with its need for weekly watering. The heavy antique table anchoring the center of the room. And my cat, weighted with thick belly and long fur, will peer out through the gridded bars of the window screen at the last of the summer’s silver-winged seagulls, rising up into the globe of the moonless sky.
Andrea Bianchi is a legal assistant in Chicago, where she is pursuing a creative writing certificate at Northwestern University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Wheaton College. Her writing has previously appeared in the Chicago Tribune and on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.