I.
Two girls, who were not my friends, pulled up their shirts to show me a set of matching birthmarks. They claimed the spots marked the places where wings had been cut from their shoulders, brutally removed. They were angels, they insisted, swearing me to secrecy. Because we went to Catholic school, I believed them. Because I was lonely, I contorted myself around my mirror, studied my own blank back. 

II.
A beautiful classmate took me under her wing at a party, where for a few hours, I felt nearly beautiful too. Later that night, walking home, we found a man passed out drunk on a sidewalk. We leaned over, rousing him, a pair of good Samaritans. He was so lovely in the moonlight that I almost believed that he was a gift, left just for me to find him. I searched for invitation behind his eyes as he blinked back to consciousness, willing him to save me from my shyness, from the terrible lonesomeness I feared I carried around, projected like an aura. "My angel," he breathed, but when he rose, I wasn't the one that he reached for.

III.
A careless boy, who would later willfully mishandle my tenderly swollen heart, once tried to describe me as an angel in a poem. But in his haste, in spelling it wrong, he demoted me to angle instead. No chance for ascendance in that arrangement, no softness in that fall. Just disappointments all the way down, and such sharp edges. 

Read her postcard.





W i g l e a f               01-14-21                                [home]