love and other impossibilities

There is a story among the angels.

Sometimes it’s circulated as an urban legend, sometimes a cautionary tale. About boundaries and safety and the limitations of God’s brightest creatures (I never figured out which of the two the last bit was referring to).

It goes something like this. In the early ages of the world — but not too early, because mankind had already set their rules and buildings on the earth, and the churches had things like stained glass and cruelty in them — there was an angel who took regular trips to supervise the parishes. They were not one of the Elder Ones who had crafted the Elements, but they were senior enough to have assisted in delivering Emotion to humanity. This angel had helped deliver Love. In the early days, they had also functioned as a messenger, in all the fashion of burning trees and drowned cities, so now they were given the task of ensuring that His gifts were used well. As the other angels did, they spent considerable time in the churches — they were a site of both work and sanctuary — and the angel would sit on the highest arches of the stone columns, perched on swirling carvings of leaves and wings, pouring light upon the marbled floors instead of shadow. They would watch the devout walk, pray and tremble, and they would nod in silent approval.

Then there was a nun.

There was no doubt about it. Even in her starched habit and her shapeless robes, she was beautiful. She was the sort of girl with eyes like summer pools and lips that were always slightly parted, and in the colder springs her cheeks would flush like the promise of wildflowers. She was also the most fervently devout of all the nuns, and the angel watched every time she rose from hours of praying, knees permanently bruised and caked with dust. The Word was all she talked about, sang about, dreamed about.

“Last night I am sure an angel visited me in my sleep,” she would tell the other nuns at breakfast.

“He was tall, and golden, and he told me I was special.”

“Eat your porridge,” the other nuns would reply.

(Later on, the angel asked their brethren if this was true. A senior angel arched one brow at them and answered, “It seems that nuns share similar dreams”).

At first the angel took this as a positive sign. Devotion meant that the gift of Love had been successful; had been put to good use for the Lord. They watched her rise from the pew every daybreak, watched her increasingly unsteady knees, watched the way the sunlight slipped down her outstretched hands and rose from the tip of her nose. Then watched the shadows billow across her cloak when she walked, watched a river of auburn tumble from her head and onto her shoulders when she took off her habit.

And from the angel’s perch, high up in the arches, a strange thing knotted itself in their stomach.They told themselves that they were following her to observe how Love functioned amongst the humans. It was the emotion in its purest form, they reasoned. Such incredible devotion. It was necessary to observe her to see if it could be encouraged and replicated in other humans. It was less necessary to keep the weather sunny when she went out to the gardens for walks, or listen to the sweetness of her prayers rather than the prayers themselves. But it was all helpful, the angel reasoned, for refining the manufacturing of humanity.

But, as I now know, angels are not good at lying to themselves. Years of this observation passed before one day, watching the nun smile at a biblical passage and cup her cheek in one hand, the angel grimly acknowledged that they had broken the proper boundaries between Man and the Divine.

I am a fool, they thought. I delivered Love to humanity, helped to infuse their hearts with it and tied the strings between lovers, family, friends. But I am a stranger to this baser emotion.

But I can talk to her. I have delivered messages to Mankind before. I will speak to her when she is asleep. There will be no harsh consequences — after all, they say nuns share similar dreams.

So they waited on their perch for a night when the nun had fallen asleep reading, her arm outstretched and her wrist drooping to the floor. The angel waited for the moon and the clouds and the wind to leave. Then softly, excruciatingly slowly, they walked towards her.

The angel knelt at her feet. They reached out and gently held her hand.

The nun jolted awake. She scrambled backwards, eyes bulging, they realized she was terrified. Am I so ugly? The angel thought as she opened her mouth to scream.

BE NOT AFRAID, they echoed, panicked. The first note of a grotesque screech pierced through the pews, silenced by a harried clamping of a hand to her mouth. The angel stared at the struggling nun, and they felt what angels would feel if they had the capacity for confusion or misery.

(The last one that felt like that fell from His favour. He was also beautiful, and I’m not allowed to say his name.)

I AM AN ANGEL, they bellowed, now sincerely horrified. The nun was on the verge of tears, They let go of her, and she fell to the floor, gasping.

“Lord, what have I done?” Sorrow rasped her throat. “I am your servant. I beg you, protect me.” The angel felt something long and jagged in their chest.

The tragedy is that we often forget how our true forms look to humanity. All those wings, those eyes, that ever-revolving light is a kind of divine beauty that humanity does not have the capacity
to understand. To them, it is terror.

The nun threw up her hands and wept. “Why do you come to me, angel? Why?”

BECAUSE, they echoed, hesitant. Because I am in love with you.

And the angel saw from the look on her face that they had done something irredeemable.

So, in their hurt and blind panic, they gave her love the only way an angel of their sort is allowed to. The way they had set trees on fire and drowned cities for days on end. They took the light that
burst from their wings — the light that had warmed the nun’s gardens and made her smile — and fashioned it to flame, wrenched the wretched thing from their chest and forged a spear, and
stabbed her with it. Over and over again, as she screamed and writhed and burned. Her blood soaked into her clothes and stained the floor, and she was clutching the spear with the little mortality she had been given. What a cruel thing I give, the angel thought. They also knew it was the greatest, most divine ecstasy the nun would ever know. Perhaps the greatest all of humanity would ever know. So after a moan escaped her lips and her toes went limp, the angel laid her onto the ground, covered her feet, and limped away from the church.

Outside, it was pouring. That was how the angel did not notice the tears pouring down their face.

If they had, they would have been alarmed. The last angel to cry — well, I’m still not allowed to say his name.

Some say the angel went to their superior again. To ask why this was the only form of love they could give, to ask if there was a way to become human, like in the silly fairy tales humanity spun for itself. Some say they threw their spear into the ocean and then themselves, that both dissolved into sea foam. That in one part of the world humanity believes that a goddess rose out of it.

The angels whisper that he walked downwards and was never seen again.

The angels and I know this because the nun wrote about it when she woke up. She was fine, of course. The encounter solidified her faith even further, and she told everyone who would listen about the angel in her dream, chronicling it in scripture that got passed on and on. But she left out the part about the angel being in love — after all, she is human. She did not understand.

The angels sometimes tell it as an urban legend, sometimes a cautionary tale. I remember the first time I heard it, I dismissed it as nonsense the younger angels heard about from a bored senior or an imaginative human.

But now, in quieter moments, when I watch you reach out towards the sunlight streaming in from the little square window of our bedroom, fingers playing with the floating dust, I swear that that
is not the kind of love I would ever gift anyone.

“What?” you say, black curls spilling riotously from your head to your breasts.

“Nothing,” I say. The two stumps on my back ache sometimes, but I’ve gotten used to walking and the ground. “I made porridge. Eat some.”