She still believes in angels.

Even as the silent cold greets every desperately whispered prayer that she throws at her ceiling before closing red-rimmed blues for another evening of purgatory, she's certain that at least one creature lurks nearby. One willing to plead on her behalf to the closed ears and deaf eyes of a God that has grown tired of her worn out excuses and re-run fornications. So she prays anyway, more to the renegade seraphim, because she knows no one else listens anymore.

There is a point, (sometimes several points,) of each and every day when her body decides to go on a union strike. She's certain her heart is the strike leader; every muscle and organ and nerve ending just freezes up and stops responding to the stimuli of existing. She stares ahead as if there's nothing crossing her view finder and doesn't feel the cold, the hot.... just the empty of numb. Sometimes it happens as she drives from one destination to the next, and those times are oddly not as alarming as they should be. The moments of not feeling at all are remarkably preferable.

Because when she's not numb, she's overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by shattering elation that alleviates the ability to think clearly, and then, almost as quickly, immediately overwhelmed by grief and yearning so deep that she collapses inside and out. Eyes that glow with the heat and passion of unquenchable fire are washed cold with the liquid ice that breaks the dams and stains her eyes red... almost on cue. Pain on demand. Each attack takes away a little more resilience, each recovery a little less complete. She feels the fight weakening into something not much more that a cat-scratch.

Every motion is performed on autopilot. Her job, her social interactions, her family life. Even her smile is nothing more than a default setting. She crosses streets without looking, wishing for a careless driver. She drives thoughtlessly down boulevards ill-famed for punctuating mortality abruptly. But no curtain calls. Certainly, it must be the doing of a cruelly benevolent guardian keeping her in the cosmic exchange. Perhaps she needs to call out her benefactor. Validate the concept that if a soul gives up enough times, then destiny will forfeit their game for them.

She climbs through her window in night's blackness and settles herself on the edge of the landing. She used to be afraid of heights, but that is yet another reaction that short circuited. Her feet dangle over the edge, and she stares dully at double streams of red and yellow as the world lives without her. Infinite space beneath her... but she knows the fall would be a quick one. She wouldn't have much time to be afraid. And she would have even less time to reflect, react.... regret. Not even enough time to say goodbye as she proves once and for all that man was never meant to fly.

Even as the chilled night whispers in pinpricks over her bare skin, she feels the raging inferno inside her sternum again. The desire to be something more... someone more... than she has the balls to become. As her cheeks are baptized yet again by saline morphine, she stares down at the curb. No apparitions meet her gaze. No ephemeral shadows of white flicker across her horizon to beseige her. She scoots forward just a bit. The reality doesn't register. Finality does not connect. She looks skyward (maybe the last time?) and searches out which star she will reach for, as she whispers another plea for redemption.

She still believes in angels.

It will only take one to break her fall..........

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