Icarus

Icarus

by Megan Jauregui Eccles

My son is more than wax wings. He is long eyelashes and mischievous smiles and curly, golden hair. He is untied sandals and scraped knees and impetuous eye rolls. He is loud whispers and made-up songs and boisterous laughter. And when he falls like a star from the sky to the sea, he ceases.

But no one remembers him as anything more than a warning. No one knows the boy, just the myth. And here am I, a father, foolish to love such a flawed young man. Because that’s what he’ll always be—young. 

He’ll never know the touch of grey in his beard, or the taste of a sweet apple on a crisp, autumn morn, or the tide of love when a father holds his child for the first time.

He is, he was, but he never will be.

Love is a labyrinth meant to trap and trick you. Love is a monster made of flesh and bones and drowned son. Love is a curse for things you can’t hold forever. I see his face in the fractured reflection of the sun on the sea and try to remember him as that bright, endless boy instead of the look of rapturous pain and regret on his face in those final moments. 

We are not the sum of our imperfections. We are not one brash moment, a final mistake. We are all suns, bright and burning and falling and dying. We are universal, unicursal. We are everything.