Angel’s Character Analysis

Angel, vegetarian vampire detective, silently shrinks from humanity, while years of regret stain his newly possessed soul. He converses only when necessary, avoids eye contact and skulks alone with late night bottles of blood, like an old veteran contemplates his lost comrades over Scotch. Early into season 2, his resurfacing past evokes the question: What is Angel’s true character (as per his actions in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been)?

The filming offers plenty of hero\villain clues contradicting one another. During the first clip within Angel’s past, the bellhop admits feeling discomforted and apprehensive in Angel’s presence. When delivering his bill, the bellhop hesitates to exit the elevator. When he does build up the courage, the film draws the eye slowly and dreadfully down the dimly lit corridor before the bellboy reluctantly arrives at the door. He taps almost inaudibly at the door, his voice whispers into the room. After hearing Angel rustling, he sets the tray on the floor and rushes back to the safety of the elevator. The viewer expects the opening door will reveal some monstrous creature. The camera slowly ascends to reveal Angel’s face. They use the opposite portrayal near the second to last scene. The heroic vampire bursts into the room where the now elderly Judy has spent 50 years feeding her turmoil to a hungry demon. She ponders, “I don’t hear them anymore,” of the Thesulac demon he just only just vanquished. Good-naturedly, he lets he run her fingers across his face, inspecting for changes. He gently reassures her, helps her into the bed where she (presumably) dies comfortably and at peace.

The plot distinctively repeats the theme of the double life, of passing for one thing while denying an equal truth. Judy is black, passing for white. An actor passes for straight. Fangs aside, Angel is neither hero masking villain or vice versa. Angel is self-interested, passing for a lost soul in need of redemption.
He has some good guy credentials. Although his bloodlust is keen, Angel resists killing humans. His condition affords him predatorial advantages: super strength, heightened senses of smell, vision, and hearing. Vampirism lends itself to slaughter, but Angel stopped hunting victims when the gypsies cursed (or blessed) him with a soul. He protects Judy from incarceration, beating up a detective, and hiding her stolen money. In his single truly altruistic act, after searching for a way to defeat the demon that plagues the Hyperion, Angel takes Judy’s place in the noose when the hotel’s guests head hunt for the non-existent murderer of the salesman. Finally, Angel defeats the demon, ridding the hotel of its demonic presence.

He also commits villainous actions. Although he has reason to suspect she might be in danger, he tries to evict Judy from his room, until the last seconds when he notices his own lock being picked. He beats up a detective, even though he suspects that Judy is lying. When interacting, he keeps his back turned, as if dissuading and shortening conversations. He threatens to murder a bookstore owner and demands free equipment and assistance vanquishing a demon. When he does have the opportunity to slay the presence he believes caused his “friend” to turn against him, he abandons the cause, sacrificing countless lives In order to wallow in his own resentment. Finally, he endangers his friends without telling them they’re vanquishing a demon to attain bargain real estate.

Despite Angel’s hero/ villain conflict, the character displayed through his actions is calculating self interest. At the beginning of the episode, the Hyperion Hotel, his 1952 home, is on the market, but unsalable due to its demonic inhabitant. While he could have vanquished that presence years past, he instead abandoned the cause over hurt feelings. While Angel did not take the lives of the residents who died there after his abandonment (an evil act), he did nothing to save them, either. The viewer might guess that his return to the Hyperion might be in search of redemption, until the last scene. Once the hotel is free of the evil that has bound it for almost a century, Angel welcomes them to their new home. Angel may have attained redemption by accident, but the quest was a renovation of sorts, a real estate opportunity.

An honest hermit might choose to occupy some abandoned shack or business far from inquiring eyes. Angel instead occupies a busy hotel known for harboring inconspicuous types. He sets himself out for display but apart from others, as if to be observed but not approached. His mask, therefore, is solitary, but his actions indicate he wants to be seen while disguising the want. He wants people to think him a hermit, so he acts like an inapproachable renegade. Sometimes, he will unmask portion of his true self without regard to the reliability of the seer. Only after catching Judy lying several times, learning she has been hiding behind a wall of secrecy, that she has stolen a large sum of money from her former employer, does he befriend her. His friends are the low elements of the world, so he uses their betrayal to justify the wearing of his trust no one mask. Only once it serves his interests (as with the bookstore owner) does he communicate with more trustworthy crowds.

Finally his interactions with Judy, leave him hurt and betrayed. Although he understands that the residents of the hotel are being deceived by paranoid whispers, and that she did no actual physical harm to him because vampires cannot die, he leaves her riddled with remorse. Angel himself is assumed to be struggling with remorse, but turns a cold shoulder to the anguish he can see as Judy’s face blurs out of consciousness. Even after the demon guffaws out a southern laugh, confiding that he can now feed for years on Judy’s pain, Angel disappears, betraying in turn his so called friend. Even if he left the demon there, he could have eased Judy’s pain in any number of ways. He did not, because it did not serve his interest to do so.

Angel may go on to save the world from its own dark forces, even challenging hell for the benefit of mankind. He may champion women, children and the helpless in other episodes. Perhaps he leads mankind in the quest to reunite lost men with their souls, rescuing babies from burning buildings (or was that Spiderman?) and falling in love with sworn enemies. In this, episode, though, his true character is amoral, self interested, calculating, businesslike. His actions, benevolent or villainous, are quid pro quo. In Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, Angel is human.

Final Observation: HOSPICE

Hospice For Revision-Peer Review

The small room smelled sanitary and lonely, like peroxide rain in an isolated forest. The overall scent and sense of despair hung in the air. Flowers hung wistfully in photographs on the gray walls. The white floor, chestnut curtains and bedding, and pale blue comforter absorbed the soft pink, orange and jade hues of the framed wall prints, and depleted the scarlet in roses on the bedside table. Light from the window at the edge of the room seeped inside, dim and wary, as if considering returning another time.

She reached out a frail hand from a skeletal frame reaching for something on some unseen horizon. I took her clammy hand in mine. Her sapphire fleece sweater smelled like tobacco and Robitussin, when I leaned in. She gasped as if my presence surprised her, licked her thin cracked lips into a sincere smile and leaned her head forward to speak. Although her mouth formed the words, only a muffle came out. Trying again she hazily spoke, “You wanna go outside? I think this is the last one for awhile.”

Sometimes, in less than a span of a breath, time pauses, collapses, planets collide, and fear combusts into spiraling shards of broken truth tearing into your breaking soul. In less than the time to blink one eye, every fiber of the world leaps up into your throat at once, leaving a dry acidic taste and no room for a scream. The otherwise listless walls close in, growing sinister. The clock’s deafening second hand echoes the thunder of your heartbeat. You are seized back to that terrible dizzying breath. In the same split moment the instant escapes, leaving a wake of despair. I took one deep breath, trying to cleanse the shock and dejection from my face and soul.

I croaked, “C’mon. You’ll be ok.” With my forced cheerful voice, I wasn’t sure who I trying to deceive, myself or her. Maybe it was one last grasp at hope. I lowered myself, hung her legs limply to the side of the bed, and placed one of her arms around my shoulder while I gingerly lifted her weak frame into the chair. She called it dancing. Not long ago, I’d needed help to lift her. Now she was lighter than my nine year old. Her pale skin pressed against her bones, her right eye sagged, but she was as cheerful and witty as she’d ever been, when she was awake. She pressed her parched tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Do you want to try another sip of water?” “Maybe when we get back,” she assuaged.

I wheeled her slowly, down the fluorescent hallway. Bumps hurt now, more than they used to. She never said so, she was much too tough, but she tensed and gasped at approaching cracks and entryways. Warm sunlight bathed us, breathing color into her cheeks momentarily. Two drags into her cigarette, she started nodding forward slightly, lids drooped. I lead her back into the clean gray room. Not her room. Her room was lively, stacked with rows of mystery novels, collections of ocean scented body sprays, photographs of every child and grandchild and glued together remnants of decades-old kindergarten ceramics. This room remained the sanitized charlatan of her genuine room. I wheeled her soft and begrudgingly toward the miscreant room nonetheless.

I would’ve lifted her back into bed, but she startled awake. “Let me sit awhile. I talked to Carol, and she’s having the guys move me this weekend.” Death lurked in the background behind the chestnut curtains. The second hand thundered again. She shifted a challenging glance toward the curtains, and continued. “I think I’ll be home by Monday, then. I’ll be glad to be out of here, especially at night.” The graveyard staff seldom answered calls between commercials. At night, she’d wake alone, disoriented and in pain, without help for hours. Relatives decided to take turns sleeping in the small chair beside her bed, in case she needed anything) “Monday, then,” I hoped.

I surveyed the room, looking for any sharp thing. I would have ripped the scythe from his icy hands, slicing his arid throat, with a haughty victorious shriek but that I could deprive him of it. The less than breath, less than blink, years-in-a-moment moment shackles you, paralyzing, silencing any defiant scream you would otherwise utter. In that single space of eternal second, you cannot fraction a bargaining breath, or raise a fortifying arm.

The sunlight suddenly flitted in, challenged the fiendish creature, chasing the lurking minute aside. It rekindled her countenance, fluttering of her inlaid cheekbones, dancing momentarily against the vase on the nightstand, spreading a small rainbow of protection at my mother’s feet. The air freshened, and the grey walls seemed to blush. My mother laughed, as if sharing a secret to which I wasn’t privy, again from the belly as if to divulge that secret, smiled and sighed. She braced her arms on each side of the chair. Petitioning her body, she strained out of the chair onto unsteady legs, stepping cautiously forward and into bed one last time.

Final Reflection Paper- Untitled

 

Driving through the rain on a crisp March evening, the red and green lights dance on the black highway pavement. The road inhales, sighs and shift its weight. NPR is hosting another fund drive in the background between classical pieces. Despite the drizzle, I roll down the window and change the station, counting on the wind and sound to wake me. Soft piano floats into my drifting consciousness, and I recognize the melody- her song. Instantly, the void passenger seat invades my sensibility. My throat constricts around choking breaths, enunciating lonely melancholy eroding my heart. The empty seat mirrors my empty life, lifeless soul. Absence occupies the passenger seat in place of her, a hollow proxy.

I inhale deeply; exhale slowly, light a cigarette between bursts of wind. A red neon sign approaches. “Prohibited,” the sign warns as I zip past. The small tires hum one long hypnotizing note to the discordant rhythm of the crunching rain, the tempo quickening. The angry wind spit rain into my face from the open window. The unsettling feeling of the missing passenger lingered guiltily, and the approaching neon sign pointed an accusing arrow toward my ring finger. A sudden burst of wind sweeps the car right. A purple bolt flashes downward, lingers, vanishes. I slow, stammering, toward the menacing sign. “Prohibited,” another sign insists, without elaborating.

Apprehensive, I pull to the shoulder. Postponing “prohibited”, I compose, resting my forehead on the steering wheel. Inhale, sigh. Inhale; long exhale. The car smells like stale tobacco, coffee and wet socks. The highway snakes within the mile, but I could always take the belt route. I entered the road too late, off-course before the engine started.

Accelerating again, I edge toward “Prohibited”. The rain relaxes somewhat, contemplating. A siren sounds in the distance, and I notice blue and red lights pulsing some distance in the rearview mirror, closing the distance. I wonder what travesty he races toward, what disaster remains ahead. The comfort of the approaching officer encourages me, the first headlights since entering the highway. I brave the sign.

The radio sounds deliberate, long, minor notes. Beneath the melody, I half hear half feel her call, beckoning me home. With all my forlorn heart, I wish I could follow. Police sirens fade as the officer presses forward, the light fading into the heavy air.

I didn’t embark with a destination, just a need for departure. The author of the phrase “Misery loves company,” failed. Misery wants solitude, to better hear the silence. Misery loves to brood collapsing into the span of a moment and chew it like gum that lost its flavor. My apartment, always so tense with accusation, testifies of dry resentments. The wisp of dream entreating a void love stole months away from home. Every seething moment beside my husband, I unwittingly sacrificed precious moments beside her. He detests the silence, my void lifeless eyes that glaze past and through him, resents the countless hours spent alone while I cry, toil, drink away my disgrace. I loathe the taste of his space in mine, coating the back of my throat. He’d begun to speak, in his strained “let me monologue at you” voice. Even before he finished his chiding, I’d slammed the door, storming into the night.

The rain slows, and I realize I can make up some lost time. I wasn’t overdue; wasn’t expected. I’ve been uncharacteristically punctual since March, another March when time could’ve changed my mother’s outcome. Doctors say she died of cancer, breast cancer. Someone could argue she died of corrupt medical insurance and flawed government policy. In truth, she died of failure, my failure, my delayed arrival. She died of my marriage, my distance, my inability to be close enough to decide. I have been frantically punctual since the other March, only too late.

I light another cigarette. How many has this been? The ashtray holds five butts and I’ve been on the highway an hour and a half. Metallica plays something fast I’ve heard before, but its name escapes me. The air hung tentatively. I maneuver the last few sets of curves, noticing city lights about some few minutes ahead, shining blurrily though some fog lingering in the air. The smell of the still rain hangs in the air, crisp and dank like the earth wept alongside me. My heavy eyes droop as I pull off the road and onto some gravel and snap quickly open. I pull aside and out of sight. I might return to my apartment; I don’t want to think about it now. Purple lightening still flashes in the distance. My mind lingers on the highway as I recline the seat and my eyes roll back, into dreamspace, into any other wistful March when the missing passenger lived.

Portfolio Angel

Angel’s Character Analysis
 

Angel, vegetarian vampire detective, wears many masks. He silently shrinks from humanity, while years of regret stain his newly possessed soul. He converses only when necessary, avoids eye contact and skulks alone with late night bottles of blood, like an old veteran contemplates his lost comrades over Scotch. Early into season 2, his resurfacing past evokes the question: Underneath the masks, who is Angel really (as per his actions in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been)?

The filming offers plenty of hero\villain clues contradicting one another. During the first clip within Angel’s past, the bellhop admits feeling discomforted and apprehensive in Angel’s presence. When delivering his bill, the bellhop hesitates to exit the elevator. When he does build up the courage, the film draws the eye slowly and dreadfully down the dimly lit corridor before the bellboy reluctantly arrives at the door. He taps almost inaudibly at the door, his voice whispers into the room. Realizing the occupant is inside, he sets the tray on the floor and rushes back to the safety of the elevator. The viewer expects the opening door will reveal some monstrous creature. The camera slowly ascends to reveal Angel’s face. They use the opposite portrayal near the second to last scene. The heroic vampire bursts into the room where the now elderly Judy has spent 50 years feeding her turmoil to a hungry demon. She ponders, “I don’t hear them anymore,” of the Thesulac demon he just only just vanquished. Good-naturedly, he lets he run her fingers across his face, inspecting for changes. He gently reassures her, helps her into the bed where she (presumably) dies comfortably and at peace.

The plot distinctively repeats the theme of the double life, and of passing for one thing while being something else. Judy is black, passing for white. An actor passes for straight. Fangs aside, Angel is neither hero masking villain or vice versa. Angel is self-interested, passing for a lost soul in need of redemption.

He has some good guy credentials. Although his bloodlust is keen, Angel will not kill humans. His condition affords him predatorial advantages: super strength, heightened senses of smell, vision, and hearing. Vampirism lends itself to slaughter, but Angel stopped hunting victims when the gypsies cursed (or blessed) him with a soul. He protects Judy from incarceration, beating up a detective, and hiding her stolen money. In his single truly altruistic act, after searching for a way to defeat the demon that plagues the Hyperion, Angel takes Judy’s place in the noose when the hotel’s guests head hunt for the non-existent murderer of the salesman. Finally, Angel defeats the demon, ridding the hotel of its demonic presence.

He also commits villainous actions. Although he has reason to suspect she might be in danger, he tries to evict Judy from his room, until the last seconds when he notices his own lock being picked. He beats up a detective, even though he suspects that Judy is lying. When interacting, he keeps his back turned, as if to dissuade and shorten conversation. He threatens to murder a bookstore owner and demands free equipment and assistance vanquishing a demon. When he does have the opportunity to slay the presence he believes caused his “friend” to turn against him, he abandons the cause, sacrificing countless lives In order to wallow in his own resentment. Finally, he endangers his friends without telling them they’re vanquishing a demon to attain bargain real estate.

Despite Angel’s hero/ villain conflict, the character displayed through his actions is calculating self interest. At the beginning of the episode, the Hyperion Hotel, his 1952 home, is on the market, but unsalable due to its demonic inhabitant. While he could have vanquished that presence years past, he instead abandoned the cause over hurt feelings. While Angel did not take the lives of the residents who died there after his abandonment (an evil act), he did nothing to save them, either. The viewer might guess that his return to the Hyperion might be in search of redemption, until the last scene. Once the hotel is free of the evil that has bound it for almost a century, Angel welcomes them to their new home. Angel may have attained redemption by accident, but the quest was a renovation of sorts, a real estate opportunity.

An honest hermit might choose to occupy some abandoned shack or business far from inquiring eyes. Angel instead occupies a busy hotel known for harboring inconspicuous types. He sets himself out for display but apart from others, as if to be observed but not approached. His mask, therefore, is solitary, but his actions indicate he wants to be seen while disguising the want. He wants people to think him a hermit, so he acts like an inapproachable renegade. If someone insists earnestly enough, he will up to that person and allow a portion of himself to be seen. Only after catching Judy lying several times, learning she has been hiding behind a wall of secrecy, that she has stolen a large sum of money from her former employer, does he befriend her. His only friends are the lower elements of the world, so he uses their betrayal to justify the wearing of his trust no one mask. Only once it serves his interests (as with the bookstore owner) does he communicate with more trustworthy crowds.

Finally his interactions with Judy, leave him hurt and betrayed. Although he understands that the residents of the hotel are being deceived by paranoid whispers, and that she did no actual physical harm to him because vampires cannot die, he leaves her riddled with remorse. Angel himself is assumed to be struggling with remorse, but turns a cold shoulder to the anguish he can see as Judy’s face blurs out of consciousness. Even after the demon guffaws out a southern laugh, confiding that he can now feed for years on Judy’s pain, Angel disappears, betraying in turn his so called friend. Even if he left the demon there, he could have eased Judy’s pain in any number of ways. He did not, because it did not serve his interest to do so.

Angel may go on to save the world from its own dark forces, even challenging hell for the benefit of mankind. He may champion women, children and the helpless in other episodes. Perhaps he leads mankind in the quest to reunite lost men with their souls, rescuing babies from burning buildings (or was that Spiderman?) and falling in love with sworn enemies. In this, episode, though, his true character is amoral, self interested, calculating, businesslike. His actions, benevolent or villainous, are quid pro quo. In Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, Angel is human.

Reflection Revision- Hospice

 

The small room smelled sanitary and lonely, like peroxide rain in an isolated forest. The overall scent and sense of desolation hung in the air. Flowers hung wistfully in photographs on the gray walls. The white floor, chestnut curtains and bedding, and pale blue comforter absorbed the soft pink, orange and jade hues of the framed wall prints, and contrasted the scarlet roses on the bedside table. The light from the window at the edge of the room seeped inside, dim and wary, as if unsure whether to return at a better time.

She reached out a frail hand from a skeletal frame reaching for something on some unseen horizon. I took her hand in mine. Her sapphire fleece sweater smelled like tobacco and Robitussin, when I leaned in. She gasped as if my presence surprised her, licked her thin cracked lips into a sincere smile and leaned her head forward to speak. Although her mouth formed the words, only a muffle came out. Trying again she hazily spoke, “You wanna go outside? I think this is the last one for awhile.”

Sometimes, in less than a span of a breath, time pauses, collapses, planets collide, and fear combusts into spiraling shards of broken truth tearing into your broken soul. In less than the time to blink one eye, every fiber of the world leaps up into your throat at once, leaving a dry acid taste and no room for a scream. The otherwise listless walls close in, growing sinister. The clock’s deafening second hand echoes the thunder of your heartbeat. You are seized back to that terrible dizzying breath. In the same split moment the instant escapes, leaving a wake of despair. I took one deep breath, trying to cleanse the shock and dejection from my face and soul.

I croaked, “C’mon. You’ll be ok.” With my forced cheerful voice, I wasn’t sure who I trying to deceive, myself or her. Maybe it was one last grasp at hope. I lowered myself, hung her legs limply to the side of the bed, and placed one of her arms around my shoulder while I gingerly lifted her weak frame into the chair. She called it dancing. Not long ago, I’d needed help to lift her. Now she was lighter than my nine year old. Her pale skin pressed against her bones, her right eye sagged, but she was as cheerful and witty as she’d ever been, when she was awake. She pressed her parched tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Do you want to try another sip of water?” “Maybe when we get back,” she fibbed.

I wheeled her slowly, down the fluorescent hallway. Bumps hurt now, more than they used to. She never said so, she was much too tough, but she tensed and gasped at approaching cracks and entryways. Warm sunlight bathed us, breathing color into her cheeks momentarily. Two drags into her cigarette, she started nodding forward slightly, lids drooped. I lead her back into the clean gray room. Not her room. Her room was lively, stacked with rows of mystery novels, collections of ocean scented body sprays, photographs of every child and grandchild and glued together remnants of decades-old kindergarten ceramics. This room was the sanitized charlatan of her legitimate room. I wheeled her soft and begrudgingly to this miscreant room nonetheless.

I would’ve lifted her back into bed, but she startled awake, nudged me back. “Let me sit awhile. I talked to Carol, and she’s having the guys move me this weekend.” Death lurked in the background behind the chestnut curtains. The second hand thundered again. She shifted a challenging glance toward the curtains, and continued. “I think I’ll be home by Monday, then. I’ll be glad to be out of here, especially at night.” (The graveyard staff seldom answered calls between commercials. Alone, disoriented and in pain, she’d wake. Relatives decided to take turns sleeping in the small chair beside her bed, in case she needed anything) “Monday, then,” I hoped, surveying the room, looking for any sharp thing. I would have ripped the scythe from his icy hands, slicing his bitter throat, with a haughty victorious battle cry but that I could deprive him of it. The less than breath, less than blink, years-in-a-moment moment shackles you to yourself, paralyzing, silencing any defiant scream you would otherwise utter. In that single space of eternal second, you cannot fraction a bargaining breath, or raise a fortifying arm.

The sunlight dared, though. Challenged the fiendish creature, warm rays chased away the lurking minute. It rekindled her countenance, fluttering against her inlaid cheekbones, dancing momentarily against the vase on the nightstand, spreading a small rainbow at my mother’s feet. My mother laughed, as if sharing a secret to which I wasn’t privy, again from the belly as if to divulge that secret now, smiled and sighed. The air freshened, and the grey walls seemed to blush. She braced her arms on each side of the chair. Petitioning her body, she strained out of the chair onto unsteady legs, stepping cautiously forward and into bed one last time.

Observation Revision

Observation for Revision

Driving through the rain on a crisp March evening, the red and green lights dance on the black highway pavement. The road inhales, sighs and shift its weight. NPR is hosting another fund drive in the background between classical pieces. Despite the drizzle, I roll down the window and change the station, counting on the wind and sound to wake me. Soft piano floats into my drifting consciousness, and I recognize the melody- her song. Suddenly my mouth dries, breath catches. I choke for air. The empty seat to the right mirrors my empty lifeless soul. My mother's absence occupies the passenger seat in place of her, a kind of morbid proxy.

I inhale deeply; exhale slowly, light a cigarette between bursts of wind. A red neon sign approaches. “Prohibited,” the sign warns as I zip past. The small tires hum one long hypnotizing note to the discordant rhythm of the crunching rain, the tempo quickening. Forcefully, the angry wind kicked the rain into my face from the open window. The unsettling feeling of the missing passenger lingered guiltily, and the approaching neon sign pointed an accusing arrow toward my ring finger. A sudden burst of wind sweeps the car right. A purple bolt flashes downward, lingers, vanishes. I slow, stammering, toward the menacing sign. “Prohibited,” another sign insists, without elaborating.

Apprehensive, I pull to the shoulder. Postponing the prohibited, I compose resting my forehead on the steering wheel. Inhale, sigh. Inhale; long exhale. The car smells like stale tobacco, coffee and wet socks. The highway snakes within the mile, but I could always take the belt route. I entered the road too late, off-course before the engine started.

Accelerating again, I edge toward “Prohibited”. The rain relaxes somewhat, contemplating. A siren sounds in the distance, and I notice blue and red lights pulsing some distance in the rearview mirror, closing the distance. I wonder what travesty he races toward, what disaster remains ahead. The comfort of the approaching officer encourages me, the first headlights since entering the highway. I brave the sign.

The radio sounds deliberate, long, minor notes. Beneath the melody, I half hear half feel her call, beckoning me home. With all my forlorn heart, I wish I could follow. There’s not a PT cruiser made anywhere that can drive that highway. I hear the police sirens fade as the officer hurries forward, the light fading into the heavy air.

The rain slows, and I realize I can make up some lost time. I didn’t actually start with a destination, just a need for departure. My apartment, always so tense with accusation, testifies to dry resentments. The wisp of dream entreating a void love stole months away from home. Every seething moment beside my husband, I unwittingly sacrificed precious moments beside her. He detests the silence, my void lifeless eyes that glaze past and through him, resents the countless hours spent alone while I cry, work, drink away my disgrace. Meanwhile, I resent his presence altogether, with so many perfect rooms, books, states elsewhere. I loathe the taste of his space in mine, coating the back of my throat. He’d begun to speak, in his strained “let me monologue at you” voice. Even before he finished his chiding, I’d slammed the door, storming into the rainy night.

The author of the phrase “Misery loves company,” failed. Misery wants solitude, to better hear the silence. Misery loves to brood collapsing into the span of a moment and chew it like gum that lost its flavor. I wasn’t overdue; wasn’t expected. I’ve been uncharacteristically punctual since March, another March in a time when punctuality could’ve changed my mother’s outcome. Doctors say she died of cancer, breast cancer. Someone could argue she died of corrupt medical insurance and a flawed government. Actually she died of failure, my failure to arrive in time to act. She died of my marriage, my distance, my inability to be close enough to observe and decide. I have been frantically punctual since the other March, only too late.

I light another cigarette. How many has this been? The ashtray holds five butts and I’ve been on the highway an hour and a half. Metallica plays something fast I’ve heard before, but its name escapes me. The air hung tentatively. I maneuver the last few sets of curves, noticing city lights about some few minutes ahead, shining blurrily though some fog lingering in the air. The smell of the still rain hangs in the air, crisp and fresh like the earth cried alongside me. My heavy eyes droop as I pull off the road and onto some gravel and snap quickly open. I pull aside and out of sight. I might return to my apartment; I don’t want to think about it now. Purple lightening still flashes in the distance. My mind lingers on the highway as I recline the seat and my eyes roll back, into dreamspace, into any other wishful March when the missing passenger lived.