Black

One night, he came to me, dark as a coming dream. He walked heavily and with his deep breaths shattered the silence into nothingness. He had jet-black wings, reaching to the ground, and eyes like two constantly racing abysses, capable only of consuming and penetrating humanity from every side. They were cold and excruciating, like icicles that shatter silence into color with their impact; within them, one could find more death than life. As he silently grew into the darkness, I felt his hands cling to my throat. How each of his fingers mercilessly consumed and tightened around my being. How my thickening veins and arteries beat against them like madmen. But he stood and said nothing. He didn't need to listen; he was filled with power and omniscience. The darkness, immovable, settled within me, waiting.

I felt as if I were beginning to lose consciousness. Every moment, a sticky revulsion at my body and the night flowing blackly down the walls, slid over me. The blood rushed to my head in waves, and my heart was already beating like a funeral bell.

I wanted to fade into oblivion, twisting in bed into a cocoon of white fabric. But in an instant, he tore me from my state on the verge of leaping. He tore apart the bonds of this body that bound me. He penetrated me so deeply that I began to understand the words he spoke to me silently.

You are the same as they are. And yet, I did not spurn you, and I came. You dreamed of me, you called to me every day. I am not here to free you from this world. I want to save you forever. You are death. You are death from beginning to end, just like me. But you will not perish. I will not allow it.

No one knows what kind of angel they will become. Or if they will ever be one. If you end your life at this moment, you will not be able to be, to exist. You will be suspended between heaven and earth, full of longing and the emptiness of a universal ocean of lonely space. You must live to prove with your entire being that you deserve the highest grace. You must live here and now to save your humanity from fragility and weakness, and to lead souls through the darkness into captivating peace. Know that you cannot die; there is still much ahead of you. You have reason to live, reason to refuse, reason to say "no" to death. When you discover the meaning hidden within each of us, you will achieve everything, that happiness written by God's hand.

Everything began to spin, but his eyes remained unwavering, fixed on me, tearing away my darkest thoughts. He was gone.

The next day, sleep crept in quietly. It came suddenly, or so insidiously, when I thought I was winning against my weak will. I knew I had to live, that I had to cling tightly to the green walls of air. The helplessness was already palpably gnawing at me, but I knew I had to continue. He was supposed to be with me and protect me, and I believed him. Life was at my fingertips, and like a child, I wanted to play with it, to run my fingers through it, and thus be free of this disability. When he appeared, he usually sang to me of existence, scratching with a piercing sound across the black substance of accumulated sin. Thanks to him, I wanted to know the face of day, eternally living on the edge of deadly night. It was a constant struggle. These were the trials he uttered. He told me to live, to become an Angel.

One night, a dream, bright and warm as summer gusts, engulfed me. I was full of light, spread out in immensity like a bird in the sky. I felt the white wings of God on my back and the freedom He gave me. But then my black angel came, closed my eyes, and I fell, tearing through the air with my scream. I cried endless tears, fell to the ground in a rainstorm, and he told me it wasn't time yet. That without understanding, I couldn't attempt great things.

You don't know your Lord yet, you're not fully alive, and lofty ideas have slit your throat, and you bleat with an unspoken scream. Open your eyes to the earth, so that heaven may open. Learn to finally breathe the same air I breathe, learn to live, to take up the righteous fight for freedom, for your wings.

And he left me, alone, unsaid.

Come.

It must have been day.

Follow me, he whispered. He led me to those immense gates of eternity.

Take the key, feel the breath of your Lord on your wings.

I had no key then. Or perhaps I didn't realize that the key was my hand, and my faith that the gates would open before me the moment I touched them with my finger. I stood there for an eternity, pounding their hard substance with my fists. I shattered all my desires in delirium and impatience, bleeding. I fell to the ground. I was never to see my Black Angel again.

I began to live on this earth as best I could. I searched among the trees for black feathers plucked by humans. I searched for him. As I made my way through the dense city streets, I saw the bitter face of decline on people's faces. So many of us, I thought. Each of us tastes blood in our mouths, striking the flat grayness of existence. The constant question in my eyes: where are our God-given wings? The cemeteries of the living dead, ever larger. I wanted to find the breath there, once frozen in a scream. And then I found it. I held a key in my hand, a cross carved with fingerprints. They converged in one place in a very visible way, as if marking the focus of pain and all action. It looked like a place of cognition, the crux of this entire armed struggle. They were like two scars left by an overwhelming defeat, one clear and decisive, running parallel to the present torment. The other, inconspicuous, lightly intersected it vertically, tracing a vertical space.

I understood, perhaps too late. God gave me one key from the very beginning, the cross to which one nails one's hands to gain wings.