מַלְאָךְ, mal’ākh

ملاك, malāk

I.

i think about angels most often in taxis, when the driver has the radio too low and the city feels a little hungover. light blurs on the glass, brake lights bloom and then they show up in your margins. the call you do not pick up. the party you leave early. the seat you choose on the train instead of the other one.

people like their angels loud, with wings and trumpets. the bible keeps sun-bleached faith in the classics, jesus wandering up sepulveda in beat-up sneakers, stopping at a 7-eleven for burnt coffee and a scratch-off. that is the mood, i think. holiness under fluorescent light, between the energy drinks and the refrigerated rosé.

so maybe angels exist wherever vanity loosens its grip for a second. in borrowed marlboros behind the high school parking lot. in sweaters thrown over shoulders when the night gets colder than you had planned. in the silence after an argument, both of you sitting on a stoop off orchard watching stray cats and cabs smear yellow past the corner and deciding, without saying it, to be a little kinder. if there is any order to this place, it hides inside these small mercies.

II.
some people inherit angels. legacy is religious even in its darkest forms, and mistakes cling to skin far longer than guilt. a friend of mine started noticing hers in the years when everything she owned fit into two suitcases. she left an afters alone on canal once, phone at two percent, three a.m., heels in hand, and a stranger on a bike slowed down just enough to say “take a left up there”. she listened, turned, and later heard there had been a fight on that corner, broken glass, someone bleeding in the wrong shoes.

the old theologians liked to assign hierarchy. seraphim, cherubim, all of it structured like an army. simone weil suggested something simpler, that attention is a form of prayer. i suspect angels are what happens when attention crystallizes around you for no apparent reason. a stranger insists you eat something before you keep drinking. a friend, already half asleep, picks up on the first ring. the universe narrows its focus, and for a moment you are framed carefully and beautifully, like a portrait.

III.

walter benjamin wrote about the angel of history, blown backward into the future, staring at the ruins. there must also be smaller angels then, provincial ones, who sit quietly at diner tables in connecticut and make trivial interventions in the present. i prefer these. they are the voice that tells you to go home, wash your face, answer the email. they convince you to throw away the text you drafted half-drunk in the uber, which, in the moral accounting of a life, counts as serious mercy.

sometimes they feel almost architectural. you walk into a room and understand there is no cruelty tonight. no one looks as tired as they feel. people are seated close enough to talk but not to perform. somewhere a speaker plays a song that belonged to another version of you, one who still believed in clean starts. you were ready to leave early, then you sit down. 

so maybe angels are specialists in negative space. not the miracles that happen, the ones that do not. the affair you never quite begin. the flight you miss that keeps you from moving to the wrong city for the wrong person. they live in the subjunctive, in all the lives you do not live because something, somewhere, quietly refused.

IV.

so much angel imagery has been drafted into fantasies about idealized women, untouchable and permanently backlit. jane birkin walking down a street in paris, white tee and basket bag, becomes a kind of secular angel for an entire generation. i think about a different version. the woman who arrives in your life for eight weeks and rearranges you without trying. she smells like foreign airports and good laundry detergent. she quotes sontag when you complain, saying “style is just a way of insisting on something” and suddenly what you call fate looks suspiciously like taste with more conviction. if angels ever choose to borrow human form, i imagine them leaning this way. bored, luminous, late for no one.

in photographs, they stand slightly out of focus, a blur at the end of the bar, a figure in the background of your birthday. they tilt their head when you talk about the person you think you love, ask one question, and the whole story collapses in on itself.

rilke told us that every angel is terrifying. i do not disagree, only add that they are also embarrassing. they see the drafts. they remember the playlists you curated for people who did not deserve a single track. they watch you rehearse speeches in the mirror and then listen while you say something entirely different.

V.

if there is a proper way to respond, it probably looks less like worship and more like maintenance. returning someone’s call. leaving early when the energy evaporates. offering your seat on the train. in a world saturated with declaration, the most angelic acts stay almost quiet, half-forgotten by morning.

i doubt angels care whether we believe in them. what interests them, probably, is whether we learn to recognize that subtle click when something awful almost happens and then does not. the cigarette you decide not to light in santa monica. the apology you manage to say before sleeping. that particular softness, arriving right on time, looks very much like grace, smiling, pretending to be coincidence.

-N