They say you can’t see the Earth turning, but he knows that’s not true. He used to watch the sun rise above the horizon, and the clouds move across the sky, and his friends laughing and smiling and he could see the world turning.
But he hasn’t looked to the heavens recently, and he doesn’t see the world turn. He only knows its still moving because gravity is pulling him down hard and he’s never felt anything spin so fast.
The people who made the sun rise, who made the clouds move, who made life worth waking up for, they’ve been stolen. The ones who he knew he couldn’t live without are gone. And he was right. He can’t live without them. Every breath is shallow. Food is unappealing, and he’s numb to the hunger pains, because the hatred and the grief coursing through him are too powerful for him to feel anything else. He can’t even feel his body’s warnings that he’s going to die if he doesn’t start living.
Some say angels have no true form. They’re pure radiance, no shape, no features. It’s not entirely true. This angel is made of light, she is luminous, but she walks and moves like a woman. She sits next to him, and he feels her warmth, and he touches her skin.
She appears vague and fleeting and evanescent. A spirit not made for this world. A memory you try to hold onto, but never can; the details fade. Her hair is a feeble blonde, and falls in tangled strands that look like whispers. Secrets you’ll never learn because even if someone told you, you’d never believe. Her eyes are wide, and she sees everything; truth where there is none, possibilities that others have overlooked.
“Do you know why you have freckles?” she asks him and he prepares himself for another theory worthy of a tabloid magazine.
“A freckle for every act of love,” she tells him, tracing her fingers slightly over his face, her head tilted, her lips moving and counting under her breath. “For sacrifice. For loyalty. For standing by your friends. One for every spider in the forest that night…”
He looks at her, searching her ethereal eyes, and tries to understand how she knows things she’s not supposed to. He forgets that he should be thinking her words are ridiculous. He’s not sure why, but he’s too comforted by what she’s said to question it.
“You loved them. And they loved you, but people leave us sometimes, even though they want to stay. Even though we want them to stay…”
She drifts off, and he remembers those eyes that have seen so much. He turns to look at her, but she’s facing upwards. He watches her closely and sees she’s looking at the stars, counting them and making wishes.
“What are you wishing for?” What’s left to wish for?
“It’s dark, and it’s cold,” she says softly. “But I want the light to shine. I want you to grow more freckles.”
He looks away because all light and heat are gone from the world. They vanished when blood was spilt and hearts stopped beating. All love dies.
“People think it’s foolish to hope,” she explains, and she looks at him and smiles, “because high hopes are let down, and leave you more lost than before. But it’s better to live one day in the light of hope and the next in darkness of disappointment, than to spend your life in the shadow. Soldiers come home from war and want to forget what they’ve seen. But even though they lived in horror and fear, they knew what it was to hope when everything was falling down around them.”
He knew that hope. But she’s wrong “ he wishes he’d never had that hope, because it misled him and left him broken.
“I hoped my friends would live, and they didn’t. And instead of dying with them, like I should have, I’m stuck here without them.”
Forsaken.
His voice is bitter, but she knows it’s only because he’s hurting. She rests her hand on his shoulder and leans closer and speaks the words he’s already expecting.
“Would you rather have never known them than to have loved them and lost them?”
They sit there, in the cold, in the dark. Soldiers home from the war, and he’s trying to forget and she’s telling him to remember. He damns her for it and he cries and he feel he’d rather burn in Hell than feel this pain. She steadies him with her hand, and she whispers the secrets in his ear.
“We’re not what we seem; none of us. We don’t tell people what we feel, and we want them to see things that they can’t. Sometimes we can’t even see ourselves properly. And we search for someone who will understand us completely, and know our secrets without being told. That’s what love is.”
He lifts his tear stained face and looks at her, and she’s still smiling that sad, smile. And he knows that she understands him completely.
“Would you love me?” he asks her, and he thinks the glimmer in her eyes is the reflection of his hope.
“I already do,” she answers, and kisses his forehead.
The wind flies through her wispy strands, and sweeps them into his fire, and it’s the first thing he’s felt since his world fell apart. He leans against her to listen, and she whispers:
“The wind is the voices of the spirits, telling you they’re okay, and they love you, too.”