the angel girl

Before falling in love with Angel Corella, I had already been obsessed with angels. But subliminally; I wasn't really aware that it was a collective thing. I was just thinking about it because I'm extremely pleased with Angel's name, though it didn't at all contribute to my liking him. It made me think we were such a match because my name was an angel's name, Joel means "God is willing." That made me think I had always liked the name Angel for guys.

That made me think of how I always wanted to write a story with a boy named Angel in it, and he had to be cool because his name was cool. It's like, if you're a guy and your name is Angel, you have to be cool. Like three of my favorite fictional characters, the vampire with a soul from Buffy, the blue winged X-man and Tobey Maguire's character in The Cider House Rules. I would have written that story earlier but I kept changing the guy's name from Angel to something else because the character wasn't cool enough. I finally had a cool enough Angel in a story I wrote entitled "Compromise," which is in a Quill folio and made people go "Whoa!" Well, they said.

I was thinking, I had always wanted to have wings, I had always wanted to fly. I had always loved paintings and drawings of angels - muscular angels, not wee cherubs. I was always "Feh!" over Ben Affleck until he spread his angel wings in Dogma.

I came across this story in Simona Vinci's In Every Sense Like Love entitled Angel Girl. I was so excited to read it and, while waiting impatiently for the angel girl, only then thought "There I go with my obsession with angels again." It turns out to be a horrible story about this surgeon who meets this girl who started out normal until she sprouted angel wings. She was so horrified, she tried to kill herself, tried to cut her wings off, tried so many other things. The brother of the girl pleads with the surgeon to make her back into what she was and he cuts off her wings. And she's like "Finally!" and she dies. Ew.

It made me think, if I sprouted Angel wings, I'd be the happiest angel in the world. And then, I remembered that Lala once drew this picture with a naked girl in it - she had angel wings, wild hair, a star for a face and no body hair on either pits or pubes. I remember when she gave it to me, she said, "This is you." I remember feeling so pleased - I now realize why. Even if I didn't have actual wings, other people saw them anyway.

I flipped the book to close, holding my finger to mark the next story that I was going to read (which I decided would be a long time coming), and pulling out the bookmark to place it in the right spot. Lala gave me that bookmark for my birthday: it was a picture of the ocean with a pretty pattern drawn on it with white paint and a sketch of... Then my heart stopped. And I realize, it's the same girl that she drew years ago, except she's holding a different pose and she's dressed. She's got a star on her face, wild hair and angel wings.

I wonder if Lala kept track of these things, or it was some strange subconscious coincidence. Either way, it was nice to discover. After reading such a horrible story on my newfound favorite entity.