New Wings

Get to know her better....

Annika (Rosalina?) McCalden

Physical appearance: Blue eyes, blonde hair (somewhere between curly and straight), 5’4” (approx) tall, size seven shoes, dress size: 4 (so skinnier than me, lol), pierced ears, age 17, Caucasian but slightly tan, two white wings emerging from her back, oval face shape.

Characteristics: Often very logical thinking, practical, caring but unsure of how to show it, very intelligent, very creative, loyal, she can keep her cool until she reaches a breaking point (it’s one or the other, not really any in-between), she’s very independent and likes to have time to herself, she often has this terrible need to please other people (which she will hopefully get over by the end of the novel). Her parents split when she was young, her one sister (Izzie) is actually only her half-sister, and this has left her with doubt in the idea of a traditional family, but she wants to marry and have kids one day. This also has made it hard for her to trust other people completely (and when she opens up, she seems to find herself screwed over).

History: She grew up in a large city in Canada. Lived in the same city her whole life. Attended Middleton High School (until grade 11). When she was about seven, her parents divorced. Her family life is complicated, with different parts of her family not speaking to the other.

Birthday: May 12, 1993

Pets: “Fluffster” (Annika had him between the ages of four and eight)

Closest friends before death: Kate, Diana and Beth

Siblings: Noel & Isabella. “Noel had been three years younger than me. With blonde hair, our mom’s eyes and an olive skin tone from somewhere in our mothers European background, she was the prettiest one, but you would never guess it by the way she dressed or acted. Izzie had actually been our half sister. Shortly after my mother separated from my father, my mom had dated a man for a couple months who had gotten her pregnant then moved to the other side of the country. I think Izzie met him a couple times, but she referred to our father as “Dad” the way we did. At age seven, she had been ten years younger than me, the youngest of the three of us, and had broken our heart every time she looked at us with those huge brown eyes.”

Love life? Send me a message and I'LL SPILL ALL THE DETAILS ;) (Either through my tumblr or through fb)

Pre-read note: So, I finished my novel. I thought I'd be more thrilled than I am, but I am not amazed with the ending. I think it ends too suddenly, with just to much stuff being randomly explained... but at least it wraps things up and explains things... I think.

Yeah, basically I need a lot of feedback on this section.

BUT I'M DONE! And that's what's important! Now I can just go back and figure out all the parts that don't make sense and rewrite most, if not all of it.

Chapter four, part two:

I came to this world much like Annika did – I woke up one day in a hospital room with a pair of white wings on my back. I didn’t remember things the way she did, though. To remember things in this world is typically a gift or privilege, and something that occurs very gradually.

My guider had been an elderly woman. She had shown me around the city, signed me up for the best school, essentially become a grandparent figure.

Then one day she turned around and told me that it was my turn, told me that all along my point in this world was to become a Guider myself. So I began my training, and they began to let me have my memories back. At first it’s a real shock: you go from thinking that the life you’ve been living is your only life to learning you had a whole different one in a different world. They go gentle on you, though, letting you remember only the happy things first. They deny you a lot, really, until you’re deemed “strong” enough to handle more details. Sometime between your third and fourth New Wings, and you think you finally have everything understood, then you start to remember the times your parents fought and the people you lost and the things that you did that you wish that you didn’t.

It was also the time I started to stop remembering. I gave up on my past, as all I seemed to remember was getting worse and worse. I gave up remembering my family, I gave up remembering Sofie, I gave up remembering myself. I told myself that this life was a chance to start over, a chance to forget the things I regretted in the life I had before. That’s why I lied to Annika – I figured I needed another story to replace the truth, so I wouldn’t have to remember, so I wouldn’t have trouble forgetting.

Annika, or rather, Sofie – the girl who broke my heart again and again. Sitting on the floor of the library, probably the same place where she’d been only the night before, I wiped a stray tear from my face.

I had failed again.

That’s what kept running through my head again and again.

I had gotten a second chance with the girl I loved, but instead of protecting her from this world, I’d asked her to become part of it. I’d watch her become someone I didn’t know, someone I never had known. Then, when she learned of what I did, she had run. Looking at the black and white photo in my hand, I couldn’t help wondering what she’d run from – me? Or this world? Both?

I tried to think of what I’d tell her if I had the chance to explain. Could I tell her why I’d turned to the other side all those years ago? Could I tell her why I hadn’t been there for her when she needed me now?

Why did I?

I felt the realization like a physical weight that pulled my whole body down – I had no reason. Sure, I’d been following orders. Sure, I’d been scared. Sure, I didn’t have much other choice each time. But, each time, I couldn’t help think that those were nothing but excuses and no real reason.

The tears felt warm against my cheeks. I’d forgotten what they felt like, not having cried since that night when I’d watched Sofie disappear into her house from the storm. The photo weighed my hand down and I struggled to lift it to see her face again. Salt water hit the delicate page. Oh, Sofie.

It didn’t take me long to get up off the floor, shaking the dead weight of pain off as much as I could. I left the rest of the folder on the ground, leaving the door to the library wide open as I started towards the third floor, where I’d left the meeting. By the time I’d stood in the elevator for much too long and found my way down the hall to the monotone voiced man’s office, the weight was gone and I had an urgency to my step. I didn’t knock, instead opening the door and sticking my head into the dark space.

“Sir?” I called, but no response. The room was lit by a single lamp on the desk, competing against dark mahogany walls and thick burgundy curtains, and losing badly. No one was around, the heavy, imposing furniture all sat empty. I glanced behind me into the empty hallways before ducking into the room and closing the door behind me. There was a filing cabinet in the corner of the room, but when I tried to open it I found it locked. However, on the desk under the lamp, there was a small stack of black folders and I saw the name “Annika McCalden” sitting on top.

I picked the folder up to find it much, much lighter than any other I’d seen. Opening it, there was only one white page. Across the top it had her name, then “missing.” Underneath listed places she’d been spotted. There were quite a few, and it spanned years. Today, in only a few hours, she’d been to her past, her present, and her past life in the 1940s. She’d last been seen in 1966, in the U.S., only a few hours ago.

I put the page down gently, tucking it where I’d found it, as I processed this...

I was out the door to the elevator in seconds. No one was in the hall and the doors opened for me in moments. I pushed the button for the highest floor, twenty-three, and the doors “bing”-ed close behind me. I had never actually been to the twenty-third floor, but I knew that the building was set up so that the people with the most power had larger offices on the higher floors, with the person in charge of the whole city occupying the whole twenty-third floor. I had never heard their name before, and I didn’t even know if it was a man or woman, but I knew that I needed to talk to someone at the very top. The people here knew where Annika was, but they were doing nothing, and had declared her as “missing,” although obviously they were tracking her. I needed to know what I was going on, I needed to be on the twenty-third floor.

“Ding.”

The doors opened and I stepped out into a bright light.

As I the elevator doors shut behind me, I realized I had to be in the wrong place. Instead of walking into a receptionist area or some hallways, I’d walked out into the middle of a construction site. There were no completed walls in on the whole floor, and instead the whole space was supported by large beams. Absolutely everything was a neon white, from the floor to the ceiling. Bright lights ran the entire length of the floor and were turned on, despite the fact there wasn’t a person in sight. Floor to ceiling windows displayed the clouding-over sky of Soleres along the three outer walls I could see. Between me and the sky was a good fifty feet of space, occupied only by the large beams and the occasional bucket and broom by a few dusty, unfinished tiles.

I went to turn around to hit the button to go back downstairs when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.

“Hello?” I called, frozen. “Is anyone there?”

There was no response, but a white wing flickered behind one of the large posts.

“Hello?” I said again as I slowly started towards the beam, “Is someone there?”

Silence hung in the air, but two white wings immerged from behind the beam, one on either side, low to the ground, as though the person behind them was sitting.

As I started towards the beam, the wings started to shiver, then disappeared.

“Hello?” I said again, but all I could hear in response was the crackling of a broken tile beneath my feet.

I approached the beam slowly, repeating my hello again and again, until I came around in front of it, and there she was. She looked up at me and smiled like it was any other day and we were meeting for lunch or coffee. Her blonde hair was loose around her shoulders and her bangs fell into the corner of her blue eyes. She sat with her knees up and her back against the beam, her wings tucked behind her, looking out the window at the gray sky. Moving to the side, she seemed to make space for me beside her, and I slowly sat down. Her arm felt warm and alive beside mine, but I watched her still feeling like at any moment she would disappear, only a mirage of my imagination.

Her eyes scanned the horizon as she said, “Fancy meeting you here.”

I tried to find my voice to respond but it had left long ago.

“It’s ok,” she said, turning to me and smiling again. “It’s me, Annika, or Sofie, whichever you prefer.”

“How do you...?” I couldn’t finish my thought but she jumped in anyways, saying, “I found out when I read those files. Once I saw her picture, I felt like I was looking into a mirror. At first I thought I was your sister in my past life, then I read the story about you and her. Then I started to remember being her... It was an odd feeling. In a lot of ways, it still feels like a story to me, just a story that I know really well.”

I finally worded some of the questions running through my mind: “How come you’re here? How did you get here?”

“I’m still not sure. After I jumped from this building, I found myself flying through a different era. I went back to the 40s and watched some of Sofie’s life as a ghost. I learned my wings were more than decorative and soon discovered I could think about where I wanted to go and ... I don’t know, just end up there. So of course I went back to my home town, where I’d grown up as Annika, to the place I still consider home. I saw my sisters and my mom, watched them for awhile. Time doesn’t seem to stay linear when I’m crossing between worlds the way it does when I stay in one. I don’t know how long I stayed there, watching and thinking. I realized a lot, realized things I’d done right and the things I’d done wrong, then learned to forgive myself.”

“Do you – Can you,” I stumbled, then managed to whisper the end, “forgive me?”

“Truthfully, I spent a lot of time thinking about you,” she answered, looking at the clouds. “There was this whole you that I’d just learned about and I was just starting to remember, the you that was in love with Sofie. I don’t understand all of it still, but I think I’m starting to understand why you did the things you did, and I don’t think the question is or ever was if I forgive you, Jake.”

She placed her hand on my knee, pausing to look me in the eye, before saying, “The question is: do you forgive yourself?”

As soon as she said it, I knew it was true. I had never been really looking for anyone’s approval but my own. The problem was that I still didn’t have an answer for myself.

Annika watched me, waiting for the answer, and when I didn’t give her one, she moved her hand from my knee to my hand. I looked down at our fingers intertwined and when I looked back up, she searched my eyes for my yes or no. Silence hung heavy, in this sticky way that made it hard to breath, and she slipped her head onto my shoulder.

Slowly I whispered, “Yeah... I think I do.”

“Go on,” she said, her hair still cascading down the left side of my chest, and I looked for the words to tell her that that was why. It wasn’t because of something I’d done better, it wasn’t because I’d completely changed, it was because I’d come to realize what I’d done and so had she, and if she could still love me, then the least I could do would be to forgive myself.

“I think...” The words came slowly, “I think I can forgive myself because I know that if I had another chance, at any of it, I know what I would want to do differently. And even though it still feels like I lost my second chance as soon as you left this world, I am still here, fighting for you. I came up to this floor looking to get information and then to find you. I knew that I couldn’t let you get away from me anymore. But, instead, here you are.”

I felt her nod her head, then she whispered, “Here I am.”

I let my head rest on top of hers and watched the sun struggling to shine through the gray.

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

“Heaven,” she answered.

“Isn’t this...?” I asked, slowly, but I couldn’t let myself call this place Heaven.

“No, it’s just another in-between world. They found me, you know, not too long ago. There were a couple of men with white wings and black suits that showed up when I was wandering through my past life as Annika. They explained quite a bit, about how there’s many in-between worlds, and you’re sent to one to try and teach you a lesson, to come to terms with yourself. Once you do that, you’re free. You can go where you want. There is more than one version of Heaven, and this isn’t one of them.”

“So, we’re free?”

“As soon as you said you forgave yourself, you lifted your own chains.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care, as long as I am with you.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

And with that, we sat on the twenty-third floor of the building that I’d worked in for years, but this time there was a lightness in me and an ache in my wings. The weight that I’d carried with me for so long was lifted and I knew that, wherever I ended up, I would be happy, because not only had I found myself, I’d found the girl I loved.

The end.