Wings To The World

1.

'Falling Angels.'

They said heaven was the right kind of crowded, and dusty, and soft. They said it would smell of roses and clouds, they said it would melt every part of my body into one. They called heaven beautiful, they called it enough.

They said the glass in heaven's windows would be thick, coloured, and like a lens through which you saw the world. They said I would be a being of light, they called the pens beautiful. They spent millennia trying to chase the feeling of sweet tenderness. They chased it in things that were never meant to be more than sculptures and scriptures.

They didn't say heaven would feel so... homely. They didn't say it would smell of burning wood and cheap perfume. They definitely never said it would have four tables and a chalkboard. They never said the windows would be clear, but clear enough to look down at the valley below. They never said it would sit on a hill, unseen, and watch the world passing.

They said heaven would be freeing. They were wrong. Heaven was trapping. It spent it's days intoxicating anyone around it and drawing the cat to curiosity. It rejoiced in seeing the cat wracked with the satisfaction of knowing. Heaven was a plague, a plague that held the blind to the light and made them see. A plague that wiped out your mind, made you lose, but you were happy.

Heaven was the right amount of crowded, and comfortable, and warm. It was constant and filled with light, jokes, ending with tales of sailors who no longer walked the earth. It was shanties, and stupid songs, and wings. It was wings around the world, around the people, around me.

Heaven was my home.

They say it takes a lot to let an angel fall, they do. They said that angels only fall if they do bad. They said angels were beautiful and poisoned to know that falling only happened once.

'Once' my ass.

What angel am I, then? Well, I imagine I'd be a principality. Watching over people has always been my forte, and even now I chase the feeling of that crowded warmth. I beleive it was the love surrounding the area, or I beleive it was love.

Like a cloud upon the highest hill, the breath of air in my lungs was one that spilled forward. It spilled as if there was no other love in the world.

I knew many angels in my time. I knew an angel of satirical joking- jests, tries, and sarcasm. He danced upon the line of offensive and the right bout of satiric. He surrounded himself with the angels of blood, literacy, and following.

I knew the angel of nature, who sung with the barrens of her voice and danced barefoot on the river bed. She took to the angel of dance and the angel of popularity. They sat together in a group with the angel of perfection and sung songs until the bells chimes for quiet. They would dance, and laugh, and sing songs that I remember weeping under.

There was the angel of anger, the angel of reservation, and the angel of emotion. They all sat in quiet corners, watching, waiting, and feeling.

I sat with the angel of kindness, the angel of logic, and the angel of outdoors. I sat there and I understood. I sat there, something no one quite understood, and I knew what heaven was like.

It tasted like shared food and bitter songs, like jokes and water, like the sweet taste of performance. It smelt like wood, charcoal, and art mixed with food, people, and the smell of a sunset on bare days.

Heaven was beautiful, mortal, and safe.

The angels that joked. Those Angels that wrote and composed and spoke as if the world was their own creation, fell.