My friend wrote a blog about angels, how she had seen real true angels. I have seen demons, never angels, well, not in the sense of Biblical angels. There is only one angel I have seen who sticks out in my mind. It was less than a year after Jeff shot himself and I watched him die. It was maybe nine months or so. We shared a very sweet friend named Angel. Jeff and I were her 'boys' and many of nights we stayed at her house while her mother was out of town. We would get drunk and watch stupid horror flicks and burn pizzas in the oven. Anytime we needed a ride she would be there at the drop of a hat. She deeply loved Jeff like a brother.
When he died a part of Angel died with him. I could see it, or lack of it in her eyes. They seemed to be at a loss for that sparkle, that happy girl we had known and loved. And without my knowledge she was burning out behind closed doors. I had been doing my drugs at that age, plenty of them. I had my personal love for my weed, my LSD, and of course my alcohol. Most of all my alcohol.
But Angel had a different love in her life, something far more evil and deadly than alcohol. An evil I had never touched before. Evil and Angels do not mix.
Her mother told me when I got the hospital that Angel had seen Jeff in her room that day. She was perplexed and was going to ask her about it in detail later. A few hours later the police were breaking down the bathroom door.
“Ryan,” she said, crying into my shoulder. “I thought you being here might help her snap out of it. I thought if you took this angel pin and pinned it to her gown that she might remember, she might come back to us.” She sobbed even deeper, from the deepest depths, a helpless aching sob, a sobbing that no normal sixteen year old should be so familiar, but with so much tragedy in such a short time period I was becoming rather numb.
I went into the room where she lay. I had never really realized how tiny, how small and frail she truly was. She looked like a young child laying there with the tubes sticking out from her arms, her throat, her nose. I wanted to take them all out. I wanted to shake her awake, but it was obvious to me that it was just a shell now.
The pin. I remembered the instructions. I did what I was told. I waited. I waited longer. I waited even longer. Nothing.
Suddenly her mother was beside me. “Angel, wake up honey. Look, it is Ryan. He's here. Ryan wants to see you.”
The breathing machine raised her chest up and down, the only sign of life. It was the only sign of life, the only sign there would ever be, for she was gone.
The evil that killed our Angel was inhalants. After three days on life support she was declared brain dead, and buried into the cold ground. Angels to ashes, dust off to dust. I placed one lone rose on her casket, black, her favorite color.
Comentários