If you had entered the nunnery I should not have come into this world, I said.

You were foreordained, my son, she replied.

Yes, but I had chosen you for my mother long before I came into the world, I said.

If you had not come into the world you would have remained an angel in heaven.

But I am still an angel! I replied.

She smiled and said: "where are your wings?"

I held her hand and put it on my shoulder, and said: "Here."

"They are broken!" she said.

Nine months after this conversation my mother disappeared beyond the blue horizon, but her words "they are broken" kept echoing within me, and out of these words I wove the texture of the story of The Broken Wings.