𝚐 𝚞 𝚊 𝚛 𝚍 𝚒 𝚊 𝚗

1. "𝙶𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚗 𝙰𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚕"

𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚛𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜.

 With my own personal experiences, I wonder sometimes if I should be religious. How much am I missing out on?

You hear stories of people who have all these phenomenons happen to them by ghosts, or that there's a creak in the floor so that must mean they've got a demon attached to them. I've gone a long time in my life ignoring all of these occurrences, but they've just started to build up on me.

My grandmother is religious, both actually. When my mother and father had me, both were too dysfunctional with alcohol and other life stressors to even fathom bringing their child to church. If their child wanted to practice a religion, so have it. Their child could do whatever they wanted.

Back to my grandmother though—she introduced me to guardian angels when I was about 5 years old. The idea that someone is watching over you at all times, making sure nothing bad happens to you. She introduced this idea to me by giving me a necklace that was just a wooden bead with two pearls meant to resemble wings hot glued onto it. Tacky, but meaningful. I have no idea where it went.

I took this to mean my grandmother was watching over me all the time. I'd wear the necklace thinking I'd be bringing my grandmother to school with me so no one would bully me or so that I'd get good grades in school. Looking back on it, I had great grades in Elementary school when I wore that necklace. Maybe I should have kept it.

When we think of guardian angels, we all have our own idea of what they look like. Though, when you google it, you get a bountiful amount of women with idealized faces; beautiful women that look as if they were Aphrodite herself. However, when you come to personally interact with them, they look nothing like that.

My guardian angel in particular, and you will find out why I reference them in this way, is a male. I only ever see him every so often in my dreams. His appearance is always changing, but there's a sternness to his attitude that stays the same. I recall seeing him multiple dreams in a row, and tried to ask him his name each time, but every time I asked, I woke up as soon as he was about to answer me. I recall hearing a sound that sounded close to "No" before I woke up, so he was either telling me "No, I can't tell you," or I'm assuming his name could have been "Noah."

So, for the sake of this short story collection, when he comes about into my dreams, I will refer to him as "Noah."