Another 2DT prompt piece, inspired by the depiction of angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

“It’s only eternity, Sachiel.” The way Metatron shrugged and smiled was infuriating. He knew as well as everyone else in the Host what the consequences were.

“So you’ve never been tempted to do it, either?” I challenged him.

He just laughed and sat back in his chair. “Come on. We watch these people every day for our jobs. You can tell me honestly that you’re envious of that?”

“Well…” I thought of Teresa’s sad face when she came back to her empty apartment. Of the times she hovered the blade over her wrists in the bathroom sink. Who knew whether it was my inaudible whispers in her ear, or Metatron’s, that drew her hand back. But that was not something to envy.

But then, the determination on her brow the next day, as if she knew she had been given a second chance. Small good things. Small smiles. A desire to see more of those things in her life. And also be a part of them.

Metatron sighed. “I know, I know,” he said. He rubbed his forehead. “It’s the sort of thing He might want to do. But we’re not Him, and we’re not them either. That’s not what we’re about, you know? We’re in between beings. Someone has to be in the middle.”

“I didn’t ask to be in the middle.”

“And are you sure you’re not just doing this to get some of the credit for yourself?” Metatron was smiling again, but blinking in curiosity. “I mean, you know that’s how—”

“You know I’m not like that guy.”

“I didn’t say you were. He wanted to keep his powers too, not like you. And it’s not like you’re asking for the army too.”

“Can you imagine me at the head of the Host? That’s a good one.” I chuckled. “Anyways, I already put in my application. They’ll approve it, I’m sure.”

“The very act of applying pretty much guarantees it.” Metatron sighed. “Well, as much as an angel can miss someone, I’ll miss you, Sachiel. I’ll try to say hi to you every once in a while, but who knows if you’ll ever hear me.”

“Probably not, no.”

“Well, shoot. And think about what you’re leaving behind. I’m going to have to hear another boring sermon from Gabriel about dangerous female charges and temptation and ‘This Is How The Angel Drowned’…”

My spark of divinity, I knew, was going to fade in a day or two. But as Metatron continued talking about the inconveniences of losing his partner, pretending to be annoyed even though it wasn’t possible for angels to be actually annoyed, I realized I would miss him too. Maybe that was the first sign that I was changing. He sure likes to work fast on some things.

Another piece inspired by 2DTeleidoscope’s writing prompt. This is fiction.

“Jeez, you haven’t changed at all, Peter.” Rachel’s first words to me in ten years sounded more disappointed than surprised. But she held out her arms anyway: “Come here, you,” she said, and we embraced. “How are you, anyway?”

“Good, good,” I replied. “So what are you up to these days?” I caught a whiff of alcohol from her breath as we let each other go and the pleasantries continued. The other old classmates slipped themselves around us as we talked.

“To be honest, I didn’t think you’d come,” Rachel said. “This didn’t seem like your sort of thing.”

“Oh. Well, I just thought—you know—”

“That I might be here?” She grinned slyly.

“Hey, this wasn’t your sort of thing either,” I said. “But.” I stared down at my shoes sheepishly. “I guess so?” I looked up hesitantly.

Rachel laughed heartily and hugged me again. This exuberance was new. “You’re such a sweetheart, Peter! Why did we break up again? Anyways, let’s—” She reached over for the cheap plastic wine glass she had set down on a table behind her, half filled with chardonnay, and raised it. “—have a toast. To our reunion. Hey, where’s your glass?”

“I don’t drink anymore,” I said.

“Oh. Ok.” She seemed flustered for just one moment, the clichéd reunion scene having gone off-script. Finally she spotted a nearly empty cup and thrust it in front of my face. “Here.”

“Okay…” I took the cup gingerly, trying not to get used to holding a wine glass again, and raised it.

“To our reunion,” she said. I echoed.

We clicked plastic glass to plastic glass. She never used to make me do stupid ritualistic stuff like this. We made fun of the people who did. But now: the flush on her cheeks, bobbing her head to the Sugar Ray song.

“You seem energetic these days,” I finally said.

“Really? I don’t feel all that different. I still don’t know what—”

“It’s ok.” I put the glass she had handed me down. “Listen, it was great seeing you and—”

She tugged at my sleeve. “So soon? Don’t you want to, you know, catch up a little more?” Now I saw the sadness, the same forlorn flicker in her eyes when we left for our different universities, the one that knew that our emails, phone calls, and visits would dwindle into nothing.

“Well. All right.” I tried my best to shrug coolly. “Let’s ditch these losers and find somewhere to talk, ok?”

“Yeah.” The old smile returned. “Let’s do it.”

“But I can’t have anything, all right?”

“That’s ok.” She somehow found a bottle that hadn’t been drained and grabbed it by the neck. “I’ll have enough for both of us.”

“This is going to be a long night, isn’t it?” She just rolled her eyes and laughed again.

We found a quiet corner away from the crowd and we talked. The party ended and we moved to the front seats of my car and talked some more as she would drink and drink another. Between night and blue dawn the hours flowed freely with the memories and the pain.

Prompted by 2DTeleidoscope’s writing challenge.

I was never good at keeping time. “You’re playing too fast,” my piano teacher would tell me as I ran through Bach’s “Minuet in G” for the fourth time, and she would wind up the metronome, set its weight to adagio, and let it go. Tock. Tock. Tock. Tock. If it was slow enough, I could follow the regimented time, my fingers pressing harder on the keys on the downbeat.

But the rhythm in my head and the rhythm of the metronome never stayed in sync for long. It was like my brain was telling my fingers to hurry up and get to the end of the measure, the end of the piece.

Some time in high school, I stopped playing classical music and started playing jazz. Now there was a drummer to keep time, but the thing with jazz is that sometimes you don’t play on the beat: you slip the notes between the snare and the bass drum, fills and chords and riffs dancing atop the rhythm section. It is a delicate and precise syncopated dance, though; even a quarter or eighth note early or late and it sounds as clumsy as a dancer with leaden feet, fumbling and stepping on his partner’s toes.

And so I would sometimes come in too early. “Watch your tempo. Feel it,” my band director said. And I would try. I would get it right about, oh, 75% of the time. I’d practice the entrance over and over, but I’d still slip. And every time I tried to feel it, it would be off.

But when I was alone—either at home when my parents were away, or when church youth group had ended and I sat by myself in the dark with the piano while the rest of the kids played, socialized and did other things that didn’t come naturally to me—I would play what I wanted. They were just chords, cadences, and arpeggios, flowing out of my fingers, the sustain pedal pulling back the dampers and letting the notes echo through the empty room. They were pop melodies, I-IV-V-relative minor languid sappy concoctions that reeked of virginal angst.

Often, I’d close my eyes when I played these musical doodles, and with no metronome, no drummer, no teacher telling me when to start, I’d let myself go. I played as fast and as slowly as I wanted, following the tempo of my own emotions. Years of lessons and practice had taught me where things were on the keyboard; it was up to my mind, heart, and fingers to explore, in silent rhythm, the curse of being out-of-sync with the rest of the world.

Warning: contains a lot of whining (or whinging, if you are from the UK) about my not-quite-yet-over illness. I felt like I needed to get this out of my system, though, along with…other things. You are free to TL;DR all you want. :)

I’m still, technically, not yet healed from my long illness, though the fevers have now subsided to a splitting headache and the coughing down to a work-acceptable level (or so I thought). Climbing stairs still leaves me breathless. Mornings are still vaguely nauseous. 

The doctors emphasized to me how common this illness is around this season. Early on, not long after I got sick, I had been warned many people suffer from symptoms for 2 weeks, or even longer. I remember thinking: that probably won’t happen to me, right? Well, it’s been almost exactly two weeks since I started feeling the chills, the dizziness, and the weakness as my friends and I walked through the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I remember having to go into the dark rooms showing obscure Jean-Luc Godard movies and other video art to sit, because I couldn’t walk anymore. Getting to the bus stop after that felt torturous, and I was shuddering with fever on the 4.5 hour bus ride and hour-long Metro ride home to Washington DC.

The first week after my New York trip was filled with shivering, sharp stabbing headaches, lying in bed, and 2-3 hour scraps of darkness that passed for sleep and naps. There was the constant popping of pills: Tylenol at first, then ineffective, expensive Tamiflu, which had been prescribed by an urgent care doctor who cheerfully informed me after a cursory stethoscope exam and a chest x-ray that I had the flu, and not pneumonia. “Just a little congestion in the lungs here,” he said, pointing at a small dark spot in my left lung. “Not too much.” But the Tamiflu actually made things worse, delaying the effect of the Tylenol and not relieving the symptoms one bit. The Tylenol was already weak, only keeping the fever down for 4 hours at most and not relieving the stabbing headaches—it was like a vise gripping my forehead over my left eye—at all.

Only after I returned to California and visited the emergency room did I get a much more robust prescription of ibuprofen, which kept the fever down for a good 7 hours at a time and made both Tylenol and Tamiflu superfluous. It also relieved the headaches much more. When I felt the shivering and the headaches return, I knew it was time to take another pill.

The coughing, oddly enough, began only in the past week. There was no coughing when my fever was highest. Only once the temperature had gone down to between 100-102F did the hacking, constant coughing begin. It  was hard to breathe normally or go to sleep. Over-the-counter Robotussin had no effect. Only 2 days ago did I receive codeine-based cough suppressant, which worked and made the coughing go down to a more tolerable level. I also received antibiotics, just in case what I had was actually pneumonia. It’s not probably not, though the symptoms are somewhat similar. 

The worst part was the waiting. When, I kept wondering, could I go back to work? When could normal life begin again, and replace this medicine-popping, Netflix watching, napping and lying down existence? The one time I tried to return to work early, last Friday, my boss sent me home after hearing the coughing. (I had not yet gotten the cough medicine, but I thought it had gone down enough. Wrong.) Every time I thought “it’s just about over,” something kept lingering. First it was the fever; then it was the coughing. Before long, I had run out of sick leave, and so I returned to the office at the earliest opportunity when the fever seemed to have finally broken a little (ie: I didn’t wake up with one, though it’d come back in the afternoons) and the coughing seemed under control. 

Only to get, most likely, two of my coworkers behind me ill. One was out today after seeing symptoms yesterday. The other, we will see, since she comes in to work on Fridays but not Thursdays. She was complaining of nausea on Wednesday though, and she also blames me for giving her illness, reproaching me for not realizing that unlike me she doesn’t have any sick leave at all, and she has a newborn baby. She is probably right. I probably gave it to both of them, since they only started showing symptoms one day after I returned. I worked all alone in the corner today, which was probably for the best. Maybe it’ll be like that tomorrow too. But I feel terrible that I might be responsible for getting them sick. I might have put my own financial and work needs above the health of others.

Maybe I was so eager to return to work because the idleness of the last two weeks had begun to take a toll. I felt like my life couldn’t really progress anywhere so long as I had all this pain, all this discomfort and coughing and the potential of passing it along to others. In a way it was worse than my 5 day hospitalization 4 years ago. That time was well-defined, and the truth of the matter was that I did not really feel nearly as sick then as I did now. I was mostly bored, watching Dr Phil and Judge Judy on the TV and not being able to surf the Internet. Pain was added on to this round, and the uncertainty of just when it was going to end definitively. It seems to be going out with a very long whimper rather than a bang.

It’s too early to say if I learned anything from this experience, other than that my body is fragile and that I was reminded of how little in life is really under my control. That I really need to care for my body, or it will break down without warning. That sounds like the sort of thing God would like to teach me from this situation. I have never been very good at taking care of myself, whether it be in diet or exercise. If there is any good from this time, the minimal, nearly carb-free diet that I had to take during the illness has contributed to some significant weight loss. My normal appetite has not yet quite returned, and I intend to keep the low-carb diet going even afterwards; I hear refined carbs increase the appetite unnaturally. But the long limbo of these late days has forced me to face my once-indulgent lifestyle and recognize that stability, good health, and the ability to work are all blessings to be thankful for. They can be taken away easily. It’s a very different life, to be able to go to work and come home, versus lying in bed half the day, coughing and shivering, wondering when it will end.