Urban Angel

Urban Angel

Her pale, bony hands touch the tarnished doorknob. Her feet shuffle hesitantly and then with a long sinuous sigh, she turns the knob and opens the red door. The portal’s paint chips fall to the ground akin to blood trickling down her vein-marked limbs, coagulating upon exposure to the polluted city air. All of her gestures are marked with uncertainty-- the way she incessantly tugs at the earring in her left ear; the erratic flailing of her arms as insipid thoughts stream through her consciousness; or even the manner in which she scratches at the bridge of her nose each time a stranger glances at her, though according to her calculations, a quantitatively measured assessment: Not many.

And yet, despite the abundance of awkward, treading over the very precarious precipice of neurotic behavior she exudes, as he observes her from his lion’s den, from the four-walled room he sequesters himself to, this self-inflicted solitary confinement, he cannot quell these insurmountable sentiments. He cannot disregard the invisible filament that ties him to this ashen skinned beauty, his urban angel. He first spotted her though his dirt crusted window one seemingly unremarkable Saturday morning. He had just awakened from a night filled with screaming whispers of excruciating pain, the previous day’s barrage of foreign white blood cells bombarding his frail body composed of flesh, bone and jade unseeing eyes. He had placed his palms against the cold glass hoping for a reprieve, a momentary interim before another languorous day began. And at the very instant his index finger formed a sort of fog-ridden calligraphy, an amalgam of evaporated sweat and heinously cold New York air, he saw the troubled nymph’s face, her red lips down turned, her black eyebrows raised in bafflement; she a walking, perpetual contradiction

And thus his addiction began, where his daily fix was a mere glimpse or continual fantasies filled with contorted bodies, expansive words of adoration; love paraphernalia. And yet these fleeting glances were all that he possessed of her, was the sole form of sustenance that nourished his disintegrating corpse.

She was the sour bread he placed upon his cauliflower tongue and slowly savored; that which he garnered strength from.
She was the organic, carbon matter that synthesized his pepper but mostly salted hair.
She was the murmurs that reverberated in his ears and caught like dust particles in his trachea; ever present.
She was the pristinely white petals of snow that fell onto his infection-ridden cornea.
She was the morphine trickling through his arteries, infused through a small incision to his left arm, soothing all terrestrial pain.
She was his urban angel, her soiled wings hidden underneath her black, weighty overcoat, concealing her plumage that was thinning daily—each feather placidly cascading toward the barren earth.

She was all.
She was nothing.