For Angel

The air outside was different this morning. It was as though he had smelt it for the first time. As if it was the first time he had ever really breathed it in. He thought he must of still been a bit high. A cop car pulled up to the Emergency entrance. A man wearing half a torn t-shirt, blood, boxers and handcuffs was lead inside by a man wearing a vest and a gun and a badge. They both look tired. Only one of them looked ashamed. They both looked defeated.

Every thing was still so quiet.

The light of the day was just making itself known.

He had so much regret now that he’d done it. 

He’d finally killed himself.

He wasn’t supposed to be alive, he wasn’t supposed to be outside of the psych ward. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking a cigarette. The sun wasn’t supposed to come up that day.

He was scheduled in for dialysis at 2p.m.

What's the point?

The transplant list is too long for what time you say I have now. We know that….what's the point? Why would I want those extra months? There’s nothing left now.

Dr.Madhurima Bakra had told him that we are all divine creatures.

She was stunningly beautiful.

They had met before as children at a summer camp. They built sandcastles in the sky together. She didn’t care about his face. Once a year every summer they were inseparable. Until one year he just didn’t show up.

It was strange how the world worked.

“I see inside of you.” She had said to him “You are so much more than what you say you are. I see beauty, I see love, I see kindness, I see empathy. You are not a bad person…..”

She had squeezed his hand and smiled down at him. For a moment it looked as though she wanted to bend down and kiss him on the forehead. He fucking hated that. He desperately wanted to have that kiss. He never said a word but smiled back up, just smiled back up at her from his gown, his I.V. his stitches and his pain.

She was on shift today…..

This was the entrance she always came in through…..

He looked up at the big fat clock though the window…..

6:15ish.

She had been on same shift rotation when he first came in.

He was a child and he knew it.

He wanted to be told he wasn’t supposed to be out there.

He wanted to walk her to her locker…..

He loved the way those big sneakers looked on her tiny legs.

He hated himself.

He wanted to die. 

He brought his left hand back up to his lips, still white stapled and stitched to take another drag. Dead leaves blew around his feet.

It felt like an eternity since the grass was green and the world was bright. 

The last three days felt like a life time.

The sun crested the hill top and there she was.

In a ray of sunlight there she was. Leaves blowing around her in a little pencil skirt and her big dumb sneakers.

 There she was.

He laughed.

She laughed.

Turns out they wear big pink and white sneakers and little tight black pencil skirts…..

“What?”

Her smile somehow out shined the light of the sun that rose behind her.

He smiled.

“What?”

He shook his head.

There was no way to say it out loud.

She looked like an angel. An angel that wears big dumb sneakers and a pencil skirt and had cute skinny little legs.

damn she looks good…

There was no way he could say it now.

She laughed again and pinched his arm as she walked up to him.

“Come! Inside! You’re not supposed to be out here.”

Her accent was so cute.

She smiled at him and they walked along to the entrance together.

She reached up and snatched the cigarette he’d left hanging in his mouth and took an nice long drag and then a little one before offering it back.

This was new.

He was off balance and she knew it.

She laughed and gave him a fake frown as he took it back.

He frowned back down at her.

A curious frown.

A devious frown.

“You’re not supposed to smoke you know…..supposed to be bad fo-”

“I’m not supposed to be late either am I?”

She laughed and shrugged and look back up at him.

She got some dick last night.

That was it.

She was mad at him.

He could smell the alcohol…..

It cut him.

  He took a last drag of his cigarette and flicked it into a flower pot.

She hated that.

He knew because she had mentioned it once and he had remembered it.

It made her angry when what little beauty this world had was diminished in any way by careless acts….or any act.

He looked down and saw her clenched jaw.

She said nothing but walked just a little quicker.

They came to the locker room door she and blocked him from following.

She passed him a little booklet and and a shiny silver pen.

“Here!”

She turned and was about to close the door before she spun back around.

“I’m too busy for lunch today ok. Go to your dialysis today its at two and don’t be out there in the morning I’m already in trouble because of you.”

She slammed the door.

It had been three days.

Three days since he had ever felt that bad in his life.

She had stayed three hours past her shift to wait for him to wake up that first night. He had no idea why.

An old woman was crying in the hallway.

She couldn’t find her cat.

He had white supremacy tattoos. Swastikas and women in lewd positions. His father had cut off his left ear and most of his nose when he was six years old.

 He had no idea why. 

An old woman with tears in her eyes came and asked him if he’d seen her cat. He suggested they try looking back towards the psych ward. He held on too her, she held on to him. He was sure it must be back there somewhere and if she just laid down for a few minutes by the time she woke up….he was sure it would have come back.

Her oldest son Tommy was a fucking homosexual and was going burn in hell. He was such a nice and handsome young boy until his uncle Harry got to him……have you seen my cat? He’s black and white…his name is Astro.

   He had no idea why.

She found him a bed in a halfway house just a few blocks away from the hospital. The half way house was in an apartment block across the park from the hill where she lived in a big house with her ailing parents.

They walked in park together late into the night.

Her cousins wife’s brother came to visit almost every day and they and she was being pressured into marriage.

His mother was an alcoholic that beat him with coat hanger wires.

They walked in the park together.

He wore a big black hoodie to hide his face. He towered over her in her little scarf and pea coat.  

What was the point….

He had only had a few months or maybe even a year on his feet…. maybe.

She told him about the ducks that used to live in a pond that once was where his apartment building stood.

She built them little houses.

He used to feed the stray dog that would come across the hay field and he tried to build him a little house.

His father had shot the dog one day.

For no reason.

He never told her that.

They knew they shouldn’t be seen together in the light so they walked in the darkness. In the darkest parts of the park she was sometimes afraid. Afraid of him. Afraid of the places she knew people would get mugged from time to time and sometimes get worse. Afraid of the dark shadows that she didn’t want to face alone. They all cleared away with him walking next to her though. They all made way for them wherever they walked.

...her cousins wife’s brother was a car salesman and wore too much cologne.

She loved to go out dancing.

All the leaves had left the trees and the snow began to fall while they both stood together under a street lamp. She was explaining to him that she was supposed to go to a dinner at a recreation hall her father had rented because the… she looked up at him…. the temple was being renovated and that… for cultural events the local high school sometimes let them use…

He looked down at her and smiled.

He took her hand and held it.

With snow falling all around them all the world fell silent.

Their eyes locked and without a word he brought his head down low and she shot up on to her toes.

She grabbed onto his big black hoodie and pulled him down as he reached around her waist and pulled her up.

Their lips locked and their tongues intertwined and their souls truly touched for the first time. The world fell out from under their feet and they floated away forgetting that there ever was such a thing called fear.

They laid naked in his bed. 

He counted the little dots along the cuts she had years and years ago torn into her legs and kissed them. She caressed and kissed his still red scars and the little tiny dots that she had counted out herself. The little dots she had herself placed upon his skin. The little dots he didn’t want, the little dots he didn’t know he needed.

He began to vomit blood late at night.

She pretended not to hear it.

She would see him the next morning as her patient.

He began to vomit every morning.

He sat there there once a week on the examination table as she looked over him. She called in every favor she had to get the attention of every specialist she knew and he lost weight and his skin began to turn yellow.

It was too late.

There would be no donor.

She knew.

He was dead on arrival.

He had made sure of his fate.

The slits across his wrists weren’t enough for him.

He took a fatal overdose that destroyed his liver and kidneys and more… just to be sure. 

She had pulled him back from the darkness and for what she thought?

She used to cry in the stairwell when she started her first months as an E.R. doctor.

She found herself there again.

Again and again and again she found herself alone in the stairwell with tears that fell between her pink and white sneakers.

She cried and she cried just as quietly as she could.

Day after day.

He lost weight.

The blood that came out became more black every week.

The black blood that came from deeper within he tried to wipe away before she could see.

He insisted on walking out to the spot under the street lamp in the park every night.

Some nights she had to stay at home and sometimes he asked just to be alone. 

She could see his apartment window, and the park and the street lamp at night.

She could never sleep.

He shit himself one night and was too weak to change his shorts.

He saw the pain in her eyes and one day without a word he asked for another doctor.

She went over to see him late one night and the key he had given her was gone from her chain.

She rang the buzzer and there was no answer.

She dialed 911.

She stammered when the operator answered and said it looked like there was someone trying to break into a car… somewhere downtown. She hung up. 

She walked back across the park to the lonely street lamp that sat alone in the darkest part.

She missed her next shift.

And then one more a few days later.

She was given a voluntary leave of absence.

She looked down from her window on the hill late at night and there she saw his shadow.

Alone.

The light of a cigarette would sometimes rise and fall from a face hidden by a hood. The one he thought so hideous. The one she loved so much. The one so far away under that light that would every once and a while look up at the sky and then at her window.

Her ailing father carried her out of bed and they walked around the block together.

 They laughed about the little ducks that used to live in the little pond that she used to feed every day after she came home from school. 

She held onto his arm and he held hers.

The little ducks she used to build little houses for.

In the early morning she woke from a nightmare.

She went to her window.

He was there looking up at the sky again.

He placed something down onto the ground where he stood and looked to her window then walked off into the darkness.

She rushed down in her slippers and there lay a letter.

She took it home and tried too open it.

She wept and threw it in the trash.

She pulled it back out and tried to open it.

She tore it in two.

She never saw him under the light of the street lamp again. 

She went back to work and took a position in the neonatal unit.

Every day she knew he was two floors above her slowly dying in the palliative care unit.

 Just two floors above.  

Until one day the elevator came down from the ninth floor and there he was. Laying on his back in his hospital bed. Covered from his head to his toes in a blanket. The elevator stopped on the ground floor and she told the nurse that she looked like she could use a minute to get off her feet. She looked exhausted.

“Its ok…get off your feet for a bit. Tell them upstairs they couldn’t find him in the registry…I’ll cover for you.”

The nurse gave her a grateful smile, squeezed her arm and in her big white sneakers she trotted out to take the first break she’d had in hours and hours.

The elevator doors closed and they lurched down into the basement.

There he was.

Right next to her.

An impossible distance to be crossed.

There he was.

She wheeled him to the morgue and there the black orderly called him a bitch ass honkey as he helped her load him onto his shelf. She wrapped her brown fingers around the cold white porcelain that were once his. The swastika tattoo was cut to shreds by a blade he had held with his own hand.

The orderly only frowned at her and walked back to his desk.

She kissed him on his forehead and said good bye.

She rolled him into the darkness and shut the door.

“Personal possessions?”

The orderly shurgged.

“No next of kin…try janitorial honey.”

She tried.

“Better hurry its Monday…..”

She rushed to the dumpsters but the trucks had already came and left.

She got in her car and drove too his apartment block.

His room had been taken.

All his belongings were gone.

She rushed back to the hospital and down to the morgue.

The orderly stammered.

“Its Monday they….2p.m. ….the truck comes…all the trucks come on Monday…."

He should have been alive.

He should have had another year at least.

She looked at his chart from her computer every day.

The treatment was working.

It looked like he might even make it long enough to find a donor.

She wanted to believe so badly everything was going to be ok.

Nothing was.

Nothing would ever be.

The snow had all gone.

 Under the street lamp she sat with the two halves of a broken letter.

He told her how sorry he was.

He told her how much he loved her.

He told her he didn’t care how much it hurt anymore.

He didn’t care how much time they had left.

She had saved him.

He just wanted too see her one last time.

He told her he had seen an old man weep. The man was married to his wife for fifty seven years and he went outside for something and she died without him by her side. He told her how the old man wept.

He just wanted to see her one last time before it was too late.

He didn’t care how long they’d ever had together.

Whether it was going to be a five months, five weeks, five days, five hours or five minutes.

He didn’t care.

He wanted every last second he had left in this world to be with her.

He didn’t care.

He loved her.

More than ever he knew it was possible to love.

He wanted every last second he had left in this world to be with her love in his heart.

She had saved him and he knew now that she was right. Everything was going to be ok.

He was so sorry.

He loved her.

He didn’t want to hurt her anymore.

She cried and looked up at the sky.

The leaves on the trees were beginning to bud.

Little blades of grass were beginning to rise from the ground. 

She looked up at the sky.

She whispered to him.

Tears fell on a little round belly that she would not be able to hide from the world for much longer.

She held it and whispered.

“Don’t worry…its gonna be ok…”