Angel on Leave

I had always held resolutely to this unspoken pact I’d made with myself when we became close, whether that closeness was in relation to our proximity or our horribly remote emotional connection, I do not know. I remember willing myself to fight for your safety, to ensure that you and I could always be together. We were friends, after all. It was an unwritten law I had so happily abided by, until the day you told me.

Actually, you had asked. You had done wrong, and asked for my opinion – something that meant more to you than I would ever be able to comprehend. Even in the present, I could not fathom just the extent of my role in your life, in your heart. I can’t know because those are words you just haven’t said. I won’t pry. I’ll revel in the sheer and untarnished splendor your love so graciously supplies. I should never have been so cold.

I wrote you a resplendent little lie, and I had watched the you I chose to adore perish in the otherwise empathetic throes of my mind. I never spoke your name again. I was your faulty guardian angel for one night, and resumed that divine neglect for years. I was happy. You were not.

We grew up separately from one another, that day I decided to let you learn for yourself. I fell in love three times too many, I had passionate encounters with people I would never truly come to know. I was hurt, and I hurt others with only my lips, pressed taut against those of many. At the very least, I had always cared about every set of large, callous hands that had so eagerly encased my own, every pair of polychromatic chasms of sinful intent gazing right back into mine. I loved, I lusted, and I reaped and I sewed. I was perfect and you had gone and taken my soul right along with you.

I’m not keen on the details I don’t wish to know. You repelled all too fast down a treacherous road, a narcotic fueled nightmare from which I refused to ease you awake. You left everything and everyone behind for nothing, for careless and casual drug use, for self-harm, for meaningless and sparse kisses that would only leave you emptier than you were at the start. You felt like you belonged, and that is why with them you remained. I would walk downtown and catch a commonplace glimpse as you set it all aflame – the tip of the cigarette, the denim of your jeans, our collective hopes and dreams. You were no man, but you weren’t a monster, either. How desperately you were to become one, though.

It was pathetic, not that I would ever say such a thing to you, at the time. I would do everything in my power to keep my peace behind lock, key, and vow. I was a solemnly sworn guardian, watching my only chance spiral into the merciless licks of flame from the bowels of Hell.

Admittedly, there was a point in time where you were never with me, in thought. You changed your “friends”, your clothes, your hair, your likes and dislikes. None of it was real. You, yourself, were never anything more than a self-righteous figment of the demons that turn questions into disease, that turn pretty, nominal words into rape, and fun into bedlam. You would smile on the outside as those creatures shot gilded insult after insult at you as though you were proud. You should’ve informed your wrists and ankles, dear, they’d yet to find something to be proud of in you, too. Those nasty scars whispered all the words you should have heard from me, and for that this daunting guilt, poised gamely over my heart with a hatchet, no less, will never be deterred.

I can’t remember how, exactly, we fell back into association, and eventually found love in one another’s battered and misused hearts. Was it I that had finally found my way, or you, trying to build one for the both of us? The future revealed betrayal after betrayal as we both learned what it was to truly have a best friend. You hurt me countless times, and even to this day I find myself shedding tears over the deeds of your past. I know now that, no matter how awful and heart wrenching the tale, I am still partially at fault for them ever having had occurred.

I was your angel, your hope, your light from the very beginning, and I had adopted the role out of sheer ignorance. Of all the people you had known, I was the one who mattered. From the haze of detestation and agony and reverent dependence upon – not drugs, but the lifestyle that never truly adopted you, you looked to me for help, and I had turned you away. I even explored your circle of acquaintances and plucked a few for companionship, but I never once gave thought to rescuing you. When pushed by another lover, I would halfheartedly murmur words of guidance to your deaf ears.

I wish I had the capability to express the gravity of the damage that you caused in that one minor instance of letting me know you had become something we both knew well you would not ever be. I stopped thinking of you because you had stopped thinking of me the moment you had accepted the blunt in the first place. It wasn’t groundless hatred, it was heartbreak.

I would ask for an apology, too, if I didn’t feel so dreadful about letting the sting of a young heart in scorn keep me from allowing you to die. Perhaps if I had spoken my mind on that fateful night, Anna never would have had to come into existence. Perhaps you wouldn’t be so enthralled in the restricting web of anxiety, today. Perhaps you could have given me the shy “I love you” you so desperately wanted me to hear.

Maybe I could’ve told you that I had always loved you, too.