Born Different (2 page)

Gabe selected
the music he wanted to listen to and turned the volume up.
High.

The first beats
of the song banished the silence and were a welcoming distraction
from the constant train of internal, mostly anxious, dialogue that
was plaguing him today. As the music washed over him, he gave an
audible sigh of relief.

Gabe opened the
desk drawer and got out all of the things that he needed. All the
paraphernalia it took to keep his secret...a secret. Gabe had
plenty of secrets, but this was his biggest one, his huge dark
secret that he thought was the cause of most, if not all, of his
problems and therefore what he blamed for all them on bad day, and
there were lots of bad days. Out of all of his secrets, this secret
was the one that he was by far the
most
ashamed of!
Everything else really just paled in comparison.

Gabe looked at
his dimly lit reflection in the full length mirror. He made himself
look over every part of his, partially, shadowed body until he
caught his own eyes looking back at him.

Gabe stopped
still for a moment and he looked back, deep into his own eyes.

“I am me,” Gabe
told himself.

It gave him
goose bumps every time he did this and Gabe involuntary shivered as
he felt a pleasant effervescent chill start at the crown of his
head and oscillate down his body in a wave.

Gabe stayed
looking right back into his own eyes and staring at his own pupils
in the reflection of the mirror Gabe tried to recognise that there
was someone there. He tried to recognise himself. Gabe tried to
witness that he really was, alive. And more than that...that he was
conscious of the fact that he was alive, living a conscious life in
this body.

This always
excited Gabe and he
needed
this thrill. The thrill of
knowing something special. Only he didn’t know exactly what it was.
The thrill halted the worrying in its tracks and the thrill
counteracted the burden of what he had to do now.

Gabe looked at
the items on his desk now with resentment and he knew that he
should just get on with it and take it in his stride but, if
anything, the procedure it took into hiding his secret, got more
laborious and frustrating by the day. It depressed Gabe, but he had
no other choice. He could hardly act like a normal kid and just
throw on his clothes, eat his breakfast, kiss his mum goodbye and
run out of the house. Gabe was not a normal kid.

Without turning
his head, Gabe shook the blue glass bottle, popped the cork and
poured out a good few drops of the apparently healing, blended
essential oils into the palm of his hand. He rubbed his hands
together thoroughly to cover them completely and to warm the oil.
Then he began to massage and moisturise the dry, cracked skin on
his upper body that, like the periphery hot lava from a recently
erupted volcano, was red and raised, angry looking and seemingly
creeping forward and expanding by the day.

Gabe started on
his neck and then he moved onto his shoulders. His fingers expertly
felt for the knots in his twisted muscles. He tried to avoid any
open wounds as he massaged deeper, in a feeble attempt to try and
make the pain go away.

Gradually, Gabe
worked his way around to where the dry skin turned into thick dying
flakes on top of cracking, so deep, that red crevasses of blood
were visible between the split layers of skin, like thin red rivers
running through the valleys of the steep differing stratum of
flesh.

This was the
skin that covered his shoulder blades. This was the delicate skin
of the thin flesh that covered the bones and joints of the growths
on his back. Gabe had been born with these growths. They protruded
from his shoulder blades. They were, much to his horror, as much a
part of him as his arms and legs were.

As Gabe had hit
puberty, the growths, along with the rest of his body, had grown
and changed and morphed into something quite different from their
adolescent self. Their initial under developed, small and delicate
form, had transformed to become something now quite large,
cumbersome and dominant. He had grown from the boy with a slight
hump, in his dressed appearance, to now a man with quite an
apparent deformity.

Gabe was sure
that he was a man, or at least on the brink of manhood. He had all
the usual characteristics of a man. He sure as hell was not a bird
or a bat or a butterfly or indeed any kind of insect. He just had
these growths, or to be more accurate, wings.

Gabe had
wings.

Everyone is
born different but some are born more different than most and Gabe
believed he had been born
a lot
different to everybody
else.

His mum, Gina,
had named him Gabriel. Like the angel. But Gabe didn’t feel like an
angel, quite the opposite, Gabe felt like a complete and utter
freak.

If everyone had
been born with wings, then Gabe would probably have never had the
need to give his own a second thought. But, as far as Gabe could
tell, nobody else had wings. Gabe was so special and different that
he was unlike anybody else out there in the whole wide world and
therefore, therefore he felt, despite the knowledge that there was
nearly seven billion different sorts of people on the planet, that
he
was actually very much alone.

Gabe closed his
eyes and he inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled fully
through his mouth. Then slowly, as he counted to ten in his mind,
he inhaled air into his lungs until they were full and his breath
held steady. Gabe kept his chest high and puffed out and when he
could not hold his breath for any longer comfortably, Gabe exhaled
slowly and with control, and he tried to let go. With each tiny
slow breath out, he tried to let go of all the stresses he had
built up inside of him. The tensions, the resentments, the fears,
the worries and the accumulated anxiety.

Exhale,
deflate, release and let go.

Inhaling again,
Gabe stretched his wings out wide. He stretched them out wide and
then wider. As wide as they would go. Unfolded, unfurled and free.
Expanded, extended and excellent.

Now that he was
free, Gabe looked at his dimly lit reflection again. He looked at
the contours of his image, at his wings, at himself. In this pose
he was as no other human being would ever see him.

This was who he
really was and no one would ever know.

Gabe stood tall
and straight with his wings expanded proud and he held this
position for as long as he could. He tried to remember to breathe.
And as he breathed into the pain he tried, with each breath out, to
stretch his wings that little bit further. The pain was intense but
Gabe was always determined to hold out for just that one second
longer. His stamina fought an internal battle with the lower voices
telling him that if he gave up now then he was a failure. An ugly
failure. And that failure was all that he was capable of. Gabe told
himself he was weak and unlovable if he couldn’t hold out any
longer.

With every
second, Gabe bullied himself, taunted himself worse than any other
human had tried to. He pushed forward through the pain barriers
until he was tortured. Until the pain threshold finally overtook
the powerful strength of his rarely expressed and usually repressed
anger and self-hatred. Until he started to shake, the trembles
graduating to full body convulsions. Until it was physically
impossible for Gabe to hold his wings out expanded for another
second more... only then did Gabe collapse his wings down,
exhausted.

He had broken a
sweat and had to bend over, hands on knees, to support himself as
he panted, red faced, trying to get his breath back again without
retching. Gabe focused on the pattern of his rug and he tried to
stare beyond the solid object in an effort to try and take his mind
off the sharp as a knife, stabbing pains and agonising aches that
he felt down to the bone. Way down to the marrow. Right down to the
very core of his being.

Pain crossed
Gabe’s back and it burned so deep, Gabe felt like he was on fire.
As usual, he knew that he had opened some of the old wounds with
his efforts. Gabe felt the sensation of the wet, colder blood
trickling down over his skin; almost tickling in the reflection of
the more intense sensation of the burning furnace beneath.

Gabe knew that
he needed to exercise more. He really should make more of an effort
to get some fresh air and natural light onto his back, shoulders
and wings. He had been forced to mix with the general public for
too long and it showed in his health. He needed to build up his
strength and do something more about helping himself to heal.

“But how
exactly am I supposed to go about doing that?” Gabe angrily
muttered to himself. “I can’t exactly strip off in the city and
just start flapping my wings about!”

Gabe shook his
head and had a wry laugh to himself. It wasn’t that funny but Gabe
was in no mood to cry about it today.

What was he
supposed to do? If he exercised them, they got bigger and he didn’t
want his secret getting any bigger. It was enough to cope with as
it was. At least, when he let them wither, that despite the extra
pain they were easier to bandage, to hide, to conceal and keep
hidden. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

The only time
Gabe had the chance to live with his wings out, was when he
isolated himself away from the rest of the world in his art studio
in the back garden. So Gabe spent whatever little spare time he had
in there, painting with his wings out, getting some much needed
exercise or just doing nothing but staring up at the sky dreaming
of a better future, a future filled with sunny days and carnivals.
Of living life with his wings out all the time and never hidden; of
being a great and celebrated artist, rich and famous; of talking to
Grace, the girl he had had a crush on but never spoke to; or of
being reunited with his long lost dad.

Day dreaming of
all these things was preferable to Gabe’s reality, which was that
he was usually sat, dying of boredom, in lessons at school or
hanging out, in the cold and damp outdoors, with his friends that
he didn’t really like anymore; courting trouble and committing,
mostly by proxy, but Gabe was certain that was illegal too,
crimes.

Gabe could put
a lot of his issues and problems in life down to the fact that he
had been born this way. The wings had set him apart, physically,
socially and so too mentally. He may not have resembled anyone
physically but Gabe was just as sure that no one felt, thought or
saw like he did either. Only he wasn’t sure if the wings had made
him this way or whether it was another defect of birth.

Gabe often held
the debate with himself about having his wings removed. Cut the
problem straight off with a surgeon’s knife. At least then he would
look normal. It was an argument that was never far from his
thoughts. He was sure that there were talented surgeons out there
that could do it and getting ‘corrective’ surgery seemed to be like
a national past time these days.

Plastic
surgery, once the domain of the rich and the damaged, was now just
another consumer item ‘must have’. Anything you wanted done or
changed was achievable and for sale right there on the high street.
It was just another one of the millions of consumer choices
available. Surgery was just another fashion house, only it happened
to trade in human skin. Bigger boobs, flatter stomachs, lifted
faces, pouting lips like the movie stars, pert ripe round
butts…wing removal?

As Gabe began
to wrap the bandages around himself he thought of how much he would
love not to have to go through with this rigmarole every single
day.

But so far Gabe
had convinced himself to keep his wings, for all sorts of reasons
and excuses, but mainly because there was no way that he was going
to go showing them to anybody else. Let alone rooms full of
doctors, specialists and nurses and God knows who else. No way! And
Gabe thought,
What if?
What if he did have his wings
removed, what then? He would look normal but he knew that he could
never
be
normal
.
If he no longer looked the way he
did now, what would he be then? Just like one of the masses? Gabe
couldn’t think of anything worse.

Half bandaged
Gabe looked at himself again in the mirror. He was a freak of
nature. He’d had no other choice than to become an outcast, a loner
even, although he wasn’t as keen on that term. Loners are odd in a
bad way and besides, Gabe had friends. There were other freaks,
other outcasts and they had banded together too and were as much a
group in the school dynamics as any other clique. Gabe had Frank,
Dave and Johnny. All of them damned.

One of Gabe’s
favourite tracks came on and he turned the volume up even louder in
an attempt to drown out the voices in his head. He closed his eyes
and let the music touch his soul. He let the baseline beat with the
rhythm of his heart and he felt the melody lift his spirit. Gabe
listened to the words being sung, speaking of exactly the way he
felt. The music Gabe loved expressed all the things that he
identified with deep within himself, but was never able to
verbalise so well.

“It’s eight
darling!” Gina shouted on cue like she did every single weekday,
telling him what he already knew. And, as if her voice set off his
mobile phone, it vibrated across his bedside table, letting him
know that he had another message.

But it could
wait.

The daily
ritual of the wrapping up of the wings was quite complicated to get
exactly right but Gabe was an expert at it now and could do it with
his eyes closed. Oil, massage, bandages cut to size and wrapped
around, pinned and secured. Scissors. Another length of bandage cut
and wound the other way, pinned and secured. Again, another length
of bandage cut and wound around to bind the other two together,
wrapped, pinned, taped, secured. Done. Then a vest, T-shirt, shirt.
Check, double check. Finally, always a heavy jumper to cover the
whole lot; whatever the weather, rain or shine.