The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

TO MANY, I WAS MYTH INCARNATE, the embodiment of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. But I knew the truth — deep down, I always did. I was just a girl.

seemed there was no separating the girl from the wings. One could not survive without the other.

Of the stories and the myths that surrounded my family and my life — some of them thoughtfully scattered by you perhaps — let it be said that, in the end, I found all of them to be strangely, even beautifully, true.

Which only goes to show, some sacrifices aren’t worth the cost. Even, or perhaps most especially, those made out of love.

My whole heart for my entire life.

Love, as most know, follows its own timeline, disregarding our intentions or well-rehearsed plans.

But neither Emilienne nor Connor ever once stopped to ponder the miracles love might bring into their lives. Connor because he didn’t know such things existed, and Emilienne because she did.

“Just remember, inima˘ mea, my heart,” she would say, “royal blood flows from our wounds.”

she’d always assumed that freedom was a sacrifice one made for love.

She, who’d always thought love’s only companion was sorrow, learned that worry came

hand in hand with love.

But what did that mean? Was my safety worth my isolation? It made my mother wonder if I was lonely. Or bored.

“Besides,” Gabe finished, “why

would she have wings if she wasn’t meant to fly?”

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain.

She

worried I was just like every other teenage girl, all tender heart and fragile ego.

She worried I was more myth and figment than ...

She worried she couldn’t protect me from all of the things that had hurt her: loss and fear, pain and lo...

“It’s stupid and mean to tell a young girl that she can fly, only to have her heart, not to mention her bones, broken when she realizes she can’t.”

I realized that the church, the holy doctrines, the religious ramblings I’d once tried so hard to follow were all just parts of a lie created by humans so blind and so flawed they’d mistake a divine being for one of their wretched own.

What could they give with their flawed, human love?

children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.

As water poured over their upturned faces, their prayers were sent to the sky. They weren’t prayers for forgiveness or salvation. They weren’t sent in gratitude for the angel walking among the wretched human race. They weren’t for the soul of a deformed and cursed half-human creature who lived at the end of

Pinnacle Lane. They were, quite simply, prayers said for a girl. For me.

Dying required too much action. And if recent events proved anything, my body wasn’t going to give over to death without a fierce fight; so if I were to kill myself, I’d have to make sure I could do it. That I’d be good and dead once it was all over and not mutilated or half deranged but still dreadfully alive.

I loved you before, Ava. Let me love you still.

You don’t have to carry it by yourself.