Angelaboutme Now

She didn’t know if Margo was real, not in any way that could be proven. Maybe she was a hallucination born of loneliness and a traumatic brain injury. Maybe she was a coping mechanism, a way for Lena’s psyche to give herself the love she had never received.

Margo set down her bag of cheese puffs and took Lena’s hand. Her palm was warm and slightly sticky from the snacks. “Because you almost died today. And when you almost die, the veil gets thin. You can see things you couldn’t before. And I need you to know that you matter. Not because of some divine plan or cosmic checklist. You just do . You matter because you’re here, and you keep showing up, even when showing up feels stupid and pointless.” angelaboutme

“Why are you telling me this now?” she whispered. She didn’t know if Margo was real, not

She woke up in a hospital bed, which was ironic enough to make her want to laugh. Her body was broken in three places: a fractured pelvis, two cracked ribs, a concussion that would give her migraines for months. But that wasn’t the strangest part. The strangest part was the woman sitting in the plastic chair beside her bed. Margo set down her bag of cheese puffs

It was a Tuesday in November, the kind of gray day that makes the whole world look like an old photograph. Lena was crossing 82nd Avenue with her coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, not paying attention. The delivery truck ran a red light. She remembers the screech of tires, the shock of heat from the headlights, and then—nothing.

She grew up hard and quiet, like a stone worn smooth by years of bad weather. Foster homes came and went—some indifferent, a few cruel, none permanent. She learned to cook for herself at nine, to forge a signature at eleven, to pack a bag in under two minutes by thirteen. By sixteen, she had aged out of the system with a GED, a part-time job at a diner, and a heart that had been carefully encased in cement.

She stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Margo visited every day, always bringing snacks—cheese puffs, mostly, but also an alarming number of those little peanut butter cracker packets. She told ridiculous stories about other people she’d guarded over the centuries (a Viking who kept trying to fight trees, a Victorian lady who secretly wrote terrible poetry, a nineteenth-century baker whose bread was so bad it once started a small riot). She made Lena laugh, which hurt her ribs, which made her laugh harder.