Falling From Angels

In a snowstorm I saw angels. In a rushing dream I felt feathers against my hot cheek. Their wings and their voices brushed against me and left burn marks. The skin blistered and the scars along my back have stayed behind. They've grown white and crooked, like scrawled memories. They trace along me. When I sleep they sleep. And when I wake up they prick my, like the claws of a stretching tabby. Pain is a curious thing. It is the twisted root of an old pine, settling into my chest. And it pulls at my mind, drawing my blood into its breaths. But pain is not unique. This is what makes it so strange. There is nothing as common as the hurt that quietly gnaws. Men walk through the cold day with sorrow in their bellies, and they say nothing. 

That, I think, is the curiousness of hope. It is a wild thing, ready for the harsh desert. It is not soft or gentle. It has no beauty to it. Such a thing would be laughable to any tear-stained eyes. No, hope is mud-covered. Hope smells like old dogs and doesn't shave. Why should it? Far too often it has trudged slowly out to the edge of town. In a hissing winter rain it has walked into a ditch of mud and old trash, feeling in the dark for a hand. With a cut of lightning it has seen me curled up in a womb of tears and night and gone waist-deep to speak a word, to whisper like dawn. Slowly it has carried me back up, fought against every memory that burns and breaks. 

 

And when the new day cracks we are not clean, we are not even warm. But we can see the sun. Even in the winter, the dirt caked to our hair and under our fingernails, we can hear sharp and heavy laughter. It comes from a snow capped and wrinkled man, or an oxygen-assisted grandmother. They are giggling, coughing and chuckling because the sun has come back. It has reminded them of every birth they ever watched and every love they ever carried in their hand like a new and bright fruit. It is the old that make sense. It is their bodies that remind us who we are. Broken and forgotten, they heave in and out. They breath air thick with laughter and tears, air cluttered with the voices of parents and grandparents long gone. Why else would their breaths be shallow? There is too much to take in, too many days carried in and out at every moment. 

So here we are, covered in the night's mud, with tears and scars both still cold on our skin. Love is not clean, but it is warm and wildly alive. It is racing along the streets, a new scent and a new color caught up in the waking dawn. It will grip us by our dirty wrists and brush aside our knotted hair. Like wobbling children, like unsteady grandparents, we stumble on crooked roads. They look like our scars, they remind us of the cold nights. But we are stronger. We are walking.