My friend and I met an angel or that’s what she called herself in that little bar in Laguna Beach holding her sign that stated “I’m an angel, listen to me,” the evening progressing, my friend listening to her, and I the live music on stage from an unknown band who lived in LA trying to make it big time the stage lights, they said, looking like God their drums beating into canvas; I left soon after the show. my friend still talking with this angel a nagging feeling digging in my belly telling me to tell him “be careful,” instead, “I’m headed out for the night,” I say. “Get home safe.” “I can’t promise anything,” he replied. The next day, I was on a plane to Germany to visit my partner for a month wondering on the flight, writing to him if he made it home, if home at all, the little clock on a WhatsApp message waiting for cell signal; nine hours past, I landed; my message to him sent. Three days later: I slept with an angel. In Germany, the month passed quickly and I returned home contemplating my friend’s choice. I met him for coffee the day after I flew home, finding him dead broke tripping on angel dust. My gut sank like dirt-- gravel in water--, then, I remembered ‘it’s not my life.’ So, I listened to his tale about the rest of that night he spending it in her car the seduction his body and mind endured “the substance and the skin” the violent nights that ensued evenings after hitting and fucking each other; it was all that the two ever needed, he said, but his money was burned through spots in his memory as well, an unmissable jitter at the end of his fingers tapping the table without end yet, somehow, he was still smiling still thinking his body was in the lap of God that his hands were doing the good work and that the angel spoke fortune in his ear, after all, she was a delusion outside of the real the undeniable temptation to throw it all away in one night with a spirit who unzipped her skin to reveal a being made of white can be painted utterly gray. Maybe, I resented him, just the little.
As Hemingway titled, “The Sun Also Rises.”
in paradiso, ego sum