Note: for new/casual readers, the following may not make much sense unless you have some essential elements of context. Please read: Sandy Ego. Caroline. and Alethia, G.A. before proceeding.

elocity.

A one-word answer to Alethia's question: "So, what happened?"

It's a word that bookmarks entire conversations we had years earlier on the topic, untouched until recent events brought them to the surface. We talked at length about 'velocity matching' in those days, she was the one person whose ambition and drive matched mine, and the future I envisioned for us revolved around us chasing our respective dreams at full speed, fueling and recharging each others' reserves in the quiet moments between, mending battle wounds as they occur. We would offer each other encouragement in moments of doubt and defeat, and a one-person cheering section in moments of triumph.

Instead.

"Velocity," I said as Alethia nodded her understanding. "I kept going and she fell to a different orbit."

"It's strange, you know. Everything I loved about her has died or faded except her physical beauty; I had dinner with a shell holding the ghost of an person I kept loving that was long gone, kept alive frozen in time in my memories."

She leans forward. "Look, if you're going to write about me again, shouldn't you at least start from the beginning of this dream?"

Ah. meta humor.

But fair enough - I guess this would make more sense if I started from the beginning.

December 26th, 2007

I'm at the seaside coffeeshop again, tasting a light salty breeze through its antique stained-glass windows in my nose.

Odd.

My seat - our table is front of me, but my G.A. is not there. She's always early, waiting for me, always with a full spread of files before her that I am forbidden to peek.

I take my seat and wait. It's a strange how tightly we associate certain places and smells with certain personalities, and how the absence of one of those things dramatically alter our experiences of them.

I take my coffee and sit, waiting - slowing noticing details of the place that escaped my attention in previous encounters - the grain of the wood on the table and the scars it accumulated in its time. A scrap of parchment-like paper on the table, folded over once. Why didn't I notice it before?

I unfold it - it had just two lines in fountain-pen style script:

Behind you.

- A

I turned and there she was, sitting behind a silver laptop computer with an evaluative look on her face.

"Christ, you scared me! What are you, Batman now?"

She fixes a quizzical stare at me.

"Oh no. No no no, you're not going to pretend you don't recognize BATMAN now, I know you better than that."

"You got me," she raises her hands in acknowledgment, grinning mischievously. "I've been reading a lot more of your books and graphic novels since I took over your account - I quite like them."

"So."

"So."

Just as I was about to point to her new computer and ask 'what's this?' she spins the laptop around and beats me to the words:

"What's this?"

On the display was my journal post about her.

Her expression was impossible to read - I can't tell if she's upset, amused, or ... something else. A pregnant pause, as she's expecting me to respond.

Crap. Did I just get busted?

"I ... uh ... "

She let the moment hang for a moment longer before bursting into a sly smile.

"Quite amusing. I see you edited out a few things."

Relief. I nod, not saying any more.

"Wise enough to begin, then. So now that we're all caught up, let me ask again: what happened?"

Flashback humor. Great.

"Velocity," I said as Alethia nodded her understanding. "I kept going and she fell to a different orbit."

"It's strange, you know. Everything I loved about her has died or faded except her physical beauty; I had dinner with a shell holding the ghost of an person I kept loving that was long gone, kept alive frozen in time in my memories."

"In her time - in our time, she stood at the precipice of greatness: brilliant mind, fiercely ambitious, intellectual curious, at the nexus of infinite possibilities. She traded it for security with an older man half her IQ and ambition but I hoped, (foolishly now, in retrospect) she would keep that best part of her regardless."

"Oh?"

"Her clinical research during medical school was exceptional - she applied for and won offers for fellowships and residencies at Harvard, Johns Hopkins to practice cutting-edge medicine with the best minds of her generation, but she turned them down for an internal medicine job nearby so it wouldn't disrupt her husband's shitty mid-level management paper-pusher career at some anonymous cubicle."

"Maybe she did it because she loves him?"

I flinch inwardly a little bit at that.

(Ok, maybe not just a little bit.)

"I'm sure she does. But if he loved her, how could he possibly accept such a pointless sacrifice? If it were me, I would sacrifice my career in a heartbeat and start over in another city so she can flex her wings fully."

"But it wasn't you. Wasn't your sacrifice to make or accept."

I sigh and nod.

"Now? Now she now lives in a world of $50,000 kitchen remodelings, comparison-shopping of Lexus SUV mommy-mobiles, overpriced package vacations to Europe. Domesticated. That spark that I loved flickered out years ago."

"I can't help but wonder: if she had stayed with me, would her transformation into this have happened regardless? Or was this ... this entire thing the consequence of her choosing security over me?"

Alethia spread her hands out in a half-shrug.

"So there's nothing left to hold you?"

"No."

"So you are finally free."

"Yes."

She reaches out to hold my hand "Merry Christmas then, darling."

"Likewise."

And then I awoke.

rom time to time, I dream of angels.

I should be more precise: from time to time, in my dreams, I am visited by one angel - a hard-drinking woman of indeterminate age who identifies herself as my guardian angel, whose intense gaze lingers in waking memory like an afterimage in conscious moments. She made appearances in recurring dreams starting close to a decade ago - returning most often in times when there was a love interest in my life.

Alethia first appeared to me in the spring of 1997 ... at the turning point my first heartbreak whose aftermath still echoed in memories years after (and once again, more recently).

The business of transcribing dreams, especially those a decade old, are fraught with its own oddities; in the language of dreams - there is almost no exposition because things simply understood in the dream sound utterly alien to an outside observer - but recent events have brought Alethia back into my near-waking hours, so I thought I would go back to what I meant to write when she first appeared to me.

April, 1997

The seaside coffeeshop allows a light salty breeze through its antique stained-glass windows and in the instant-exposition world of dreams, I already knew who I was seeing.

The woman seated alone in the shop wore a white shirt and dark denim trousers - hair back in a loose ponytail - leafing through manila files. She looks vaguely Eurasian, with reddish tones in an otherwise black mane of straight shoulder-length hair. Her face had an androgynous beauty to it - willowy frame nearly my height, topped by a face of hard lines and angles - with brown-hazel eyes that can bore into a man's soul and miss nothing in its sweep.

Sharpshooter's eyes.

Upon seeing me, she motions to the empty seat across her and I settle in.

"Huh." I began, after a pause "I guess I was expecting someone-"

"Taller?" She interrupts with an impish insouciance. "Male?"

I laugh. "Ok, ok - I didn't really know what to expect. I know WHAT you are but up until now, never really imagined any particular form - but now that you're here, I can't imagine any other that would be fitting."

Silence. Her expression is curious ... playful, waiting for me to speak again.

"So ... what do I call you?"

She puts the folders down, smiling. "I'm sorry, this must all be very confusing for you. Here," and at that, she presents a translucent business card, shimmering with ever-changing colors like the surface of a soap bubble; the card's printing is in an elegant, undecipherable glyph, vaguely reminiscent of Hebrew.

The only thing I can read is the single word below where the name on a business card should appear; the line right under a long string of symbols, in san-serif font around quotes:

"Alethia,"

she says, extending her hand to shake mine. "My true name is unpronounceable in any human language, but 'Alethia' is a good approximation. You know what I am - but I am still working on getting to know you, since I've taken on your case two months ago after you drove your most recent G.A. to early retirement."

She flips through her files casually then props her head on steepled hands. "You seem to have a knack for driving your G.A.s to resign their posts or requisition 'less stressful' assignments."

"Resignations? Retirement? Christ, I have a thousand questions I want to ask, but you've just given me another set of things I'm dying to know."

Alethia takes out a flask and pours what looks to be a liqueur into her coffee.

The heat lifts the aroma of the drink to my nose and the smell is unmistakable. Kahlua.

Say whatever else you will - my guardian angel has excellent taste.

"Rookie G.A.s don't have much choice in who they get assigned. The hapless schmucks that drew you? Lightweights. That, and let's just say you have a way of being extremely hard those closest to you."

I must have given an incredulous look in response, because she pauses and looks at me with her steady gunslinger's stare.

"True, yes?"

I begin a retort, then think better of it, and acknowledge her point with a nod.

She leans forward. "Me? I volunteer for the hard cases that others give up on."

"Hard cases? So what - you're like, The Cleaner of guardian angels?"

She raises an eyebrow. "The Cleaner?"

"Did you ever see La Femme Nikit- nevermind."

Her quizzical expression remained fixed on me. She's expecting an answer of some sort beyond a dismissive 'never mind.'

"Human movie." I continued, after a pause. "Blood, bullets, a story of redemption over a pile of villains' bodies. You'd like it." I say, realizing at that moment I actually have no idea what a centuries-old ethereal being would actually enjoy.

Alethia smiles warmly. "I don't watch a lot of your movies, but I do love those kinds of stories. Your hunch about me is quite right."

"Just lucky."

"Your intuition about others is your gift. False modesty doesn't suit you."

She goes back to her files. "Impressive. You know, most humans take several decades to rack up a rap sheet this length. I can see why your former G.A.s turned in their early resignations."

I drink from my cup. "Does this happen a lot? G.A.s resigning from the posts, I mean? And how many did I go through before you came along?"

She shook her head and held up four fingers as she took another sip from her fortified coffee.

Questions pour from me like rain. "So what's your role in my life exactly? How does this all work? Are you always around? Does everybody get assigned a G.A.? Why is there so much misery and pain in the world if so many of you running interference on behalf of your human charges?"

We palaver, and it turns out my estimate of a thousand questions was a wild overestimation - but prompted a fascinating exchange nonetheless. My questions about God. My apostasy. Heartbreaks and triumphs. She ducks thrice as many questions as she answers, speaking in measured tones, a bare hint of amusement at my incessant curiosity - confirming something about me that she gathered through tertiary sources and crystallized into fact by our dialogue.

I learn from our animated conversation she is an old soldier in a millennia-spanning war for souls, a war that is going rather badly for her side in recent centuries. Even in this, she maintains her comportment - steel in her soul, a smile on her face.

"Tell me - how long did my last G.A. last on the job?"

"Three months."

I snort. "So how long do they give you, before you quit?"

Her eyes shifted from playful to serious in an instant - voice lowered as she leans forward: "I've been at this job for over two thousand years. Two thousand years - and I have not quit an assignment the entire time. Others will do what they do - but as for me, I will not leave you nor forsake you, not for so long as you live. "

"My role is not to make your life easier. It is to forge you into someone worthy of your potential. You were right about my liking stories of redemption -I've built my career shepherd those like you - those born with great promise, saddled by tragedies and scars, to realize flourishing lives whose gifts touch lives across generations. I will warn you now: there will be times you will not like me or what I do, and I am prepared to accept that. There are things I know that I will share if I think it can help, and other pieces of information I can't or won't let you know. But I will never lie to you. I will never fail you."

"I volunteered to be assigned to you because I saw what others missed - that yours is a life sown with the seeds of greatness, and the seeds of destruction. My job is to weed out the the latter so the former can flourish; My job is to see you, all of you - for what you are, what you can be."

I nod. I look at the table - the letters on the tab of the manila folders Alethia was leafing through, and realized with a bolt of clarity that they were initials of ex-girlfriends.

And ... my then-current love interest.

I reach for her folder and she slaps my hand and slammed the folder shut. "HEY! Do you know how many rules I am breaking by just meeting with you like this? Did we not just cover this?"

A moment.

"I won't mollycoddle you or shelter you from every disappointment; only through adversity can you learn resilience. There is steel in the soul of every great man, forged in sorrow, tempered through the fires of tragedy and heartbreak that would break lesser men. I've dedicated my life to building great men - and I will be damned if I fail with you."

I take it in - I take it all in, and lean back.

"Alethia. It's a beautiful name. You know, if I ever have a daughter, I'd like to name her aft-"

"Oh, you will."

"Cool - wait ... what? WHEN? With WHO?"

"Oops. Said too much. Don't you have an early class to go to? Someone you need to say a few things to?"

And then I awoke.

Damn it.

Old habits die hard - even in dreams.

(to be continued)