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It’s your last day breathing and you don’t even mind.
It’s raining. Hell is raising. Your courage is draining … you shouldn’t be fine; but you are.
There’s an angel at your side and you are.
Droplets beat on the windows, trying to break in and dampen what this is, but the glass holds—somehow. Droplets beat on the inside of your chest, then again— that could be your heart, unearthed from its scars, dusted off and freed from shards, thudding, thumping, again and again and again.
You can’t sleep. Every breath you count and beat you count and touch and stupid joke, put in the place of something you should actually say—you count. You’re in the hundreds now. When will you come around and just tell him? Now? Now? Another breath, another pound of your heart—you’re a coward. You are. You are.
Nothing but a coward.
It’s exhausting.
Your head bows—asleep. Finally in the dark and the deep where monsters creep and sickly, you feel at home with that.
After all, it’s all you know.
As you wake— the cold air on your side makes you shake and you thrash where you lay, praying to God, as if he cared anyway, that you’re not alone. Not now.
Oh God, please not now.
But blue eyes fly over you, soft as wings, and you could sing, if you could carry a tune, carry anything—other than dead weight because death is all you ever seem to hold.
Your heart slows.
Why is he here? Why is he even here? He pulled you out, his job is done now, but instead—he’s here … breathing his last breaths with you.
A coward.
The chosen one and a coward.
Doesn’t he have anything better to do? You open your mouth to ask but all the syllables catch when the shadows of the rain trail down his face as he sits by the window— or are those tears? The storm rages inside your chest with the fears that he fears, that he is worried of the end that is so near, so clear, it may as well be the glass he stares through, hopeless and ill-used. Your angel, your warmth and hope, the only piece that keeps you whole—whether he holds you together or strangles your throat closed, he’s got you—your angel’s got you.
Your angel is crying.
You’re both breathing your last breaths.
Your angel is dying.
Your heart pounds.
Your feet pound the ground.
The floor is cold against your skin.
His lips are warm against your lips.
His hands close around your hands.
Your cowardly, weak, exhausted hands—still stained with blood and death and the sands of that hour glass that kept getting flipped again and again and again. For what? For you? For your brother? Not for your father—your mother … for the others who deserved it? But for you, who can’t even carry a tune or a lesson learned? Lessons all piled up, salt and burned like they’re the evil things in the night; forgotten instead so the same mistakes can be made again and again and again. Why? There does not seem to be any reason why—not until your angel stands, still holding you in his hands and pressing his body into yours like it’s the only place for it to go—it’s home, and nothing inside you feels like it used to feel only a moment ago.
No cowardice.
No weakness … no exhaustion, even though you’ve lost your breath. Your angel stole it away and kept it close, slipped under his tongue to give back whenever you want to fill a lung, but you just have to ask for it—and that’s the trick. The sick joke that makes you sick, because you can’t open your mouth to let the words out that would bring back the air you need to breathe; so instead you suffocate, and your heart pounds and you drown in the rain, again and again and again. And again, in spite of your clamped lips, your angel is at your side, lifting you high and whispering across your skin “I’m the one—I’m the one” and he is.
It’s your last day breathing and now an angel holds your breath.
And you hold him.
And you hold hope— it’s fragile and flickering and worryingly thin. But you hold it close.
Like a hymn in your heart, it beats to a new start—melodic and in time, when there is no time left. You found your tune in the pale blue that’s as soft as wings and keeps you together, and keeps your everything. Keeps you like you’re worth keeping, like your worth more than the ending that was promised to you. And even though it hurts all the while, you smile with your lips still on his lips, replacing the questions that once slipped so easily across your tongue, every day since you were young.
Why am I here?
Why am I here?
The answer is this … to hold up an angel. To dry his tears and fight back his fears like the claws and teeth you’ve fought in your sleep. To whisper upon every last breath that he takes away. To pull heaven close, from the hell that arose; strangled, tortured, through bit lips you say “I’m the one—I’m the one.”
And for once—you are.
You’re the last one.