Angels Are Near

Angels Are Near My wish is to give peace, comfort, and hope to those on earth grieving the loss of a loved one.

I let go first. That is the part I carry.The hug ended because I ended it.I was thinking about something else —the day, ...
06/08/2026

I let go first. That is the part I carry.
The hug ended because I ended it.
I was thinking about something else —
the day, the next thing, some ordinary
forward motion that I cannot now
remember the shape of, only the fact
that I was already leaving
while I was still there.
The blue rose above me in the fog
has no smell left — or maybe it never had one,
being made of mist and memory
and the blue that grief goes
when it has been grieving a long time.
I know that blue. I live in it.
It is the color of the moment
right before I understood.
He is sitting at the water's edge
with his knees to his chest,
facing away from everything
that might ask him to explain.
I would not ask him to explain.
I would only want him to know
that I have been sitting in the same posture
somewhere he cannot see me from.
— Angels Are Near

The chair is on top of the hill by itselfand the red balloon is tied to it.Not to a wrist. Not to a hand.To the chair —b...
06/08/2026

The chair is on top of the hill by itself
and the red balloon is tied to it.
Not to a wrist. Not to a hand.
To the chair —
because there is no wrist,
no hand, no one to hold the string
the way someone held it once
when the holding was the point.
The balloon is heart-shaped.
That is not a coincidence.
Someone chose that shape deliberately
and tied it to an empty chair on a hill
and I understood it immediately.
Not as symbol — as fact.
The love is still here, attached,
pulling upward the way love does
when it has nowhere left to go
but up, and the thing it was tied to
is a chair in the gray grass
on a hill in a gray sky.
The string is taut.
The chair does not move.
The balloon strains in the direction
of something I cannot follow it to.
— Angels Are Near

The symbol traced in light on the darkhas no beginning and no end —that is what it means, structurally:the line that kee...
06/08/2026

The symbol traced in light on the dark
has no beginning and no end —
that is what it means, structurally:
the line that keeps returning to itself,
and at the top right of it, where the loop
completes and crosses, a butterfly
has landed on the light itself,
on the part of the infinite that bends.
I have been trying to understand
what it means for love to have no end —
not as comfort, not as consolation,
but as actual fact I can stand inside.
And here is what I have found:
it is not a feeling. It is a structure.
The way a shape keeps being itself
even in the dark, even in the absence of the one who drew it.
You drew it. I am still inside it.
The butterfly knows something about this —
how to land on what is luminous
without needing to understand the source.
The dark around the symbol is total.
The light of it holds its shape against the dark.
The butterfly has not moved.
The loop completes. The line goes on.
— Angels Are Near

Two people on a bench inside the clouds —I keep coming back to that.Not beside the clouds, not above them:inside, the be...
06/08/2026

Two people on a bench inside the clouds —
I keep coming back to that.
Not beside the clouds, not above them:
inside, the bench half-dissolved
in all that white, the two figures
sitting shoulder to shoulder the way
people sit who have been sitting
beside each other for a long time.
I want one hour. That is all.
Not forever — I understand forever
is a different kind of arrangement.
Just one hour on that bench.
I would not say very much.
I already know what I need to say
is not words — it is the shoulder contact,
the specific warmth of sitting next to.
The clouds around them are soft and layered.
There is no ground beneath the bench
and they are sitting there anyway,
held by something I cannot name from here.
I would bring nothing. I would need nothing.
Just the bench, just the clouds,
just the particular angle of a shoulder
I have not been close enough to feel in too long.
— Angels Are Near

The light comes from above and it doesn't askwhether you want it. It just falls.There is a person on the floor of a dark...
06/08/2026

The light comes from above and it doesn't ask
whether you want it. It just falls.
There is a person on the floor of a dark room
and the light is falling on them anyway —
a narrow column of it, the kind
that doesn't fill the room, only finds
the one thing it was aimed at
and illuminates without warming.
I know this floor.
Not this specific floor — but this kind.
The kind you end up on
when standing requires more than you have.
And something reaches you anyway.
Not a voice. Not a hand.
Just the persistent fact of the light —
that it came, that it stayed, that it found you.
Grief is the room. The light is not.
The light belongs to something else entirely
that did not stop moving
when you stopped.
The person on the floor has their arms around themselves.
The light touches the top of their head.
The room is large and mostly dark.
The light is not asking them to stand up yet.
— Angels Are Near

He found something in the gravel at the water's edgeand he is not going to tell anyone what it is.That is the whole of i...
06/08/2026

He found something in the gravel at the water's edge
and he is not going to tell anyone what it is.
That is the whole of it —
the crouching down, the cold stones,
the gray hoodie pulled up around his ears,
the fog in the bare trees behind him,
the way his whole body has organized itself
around this one small thing in his hands.
I used to rush him past exactly this.
The world had a schedule and he had other places
to be, other things the morning required —
and he had only this creek, these stones.
He was right.
The stones were the point.
The cold water moving over them,
the weight of one chosen above the others —
that was the thing I was supposed to enter.
Not redirect. Not manage toward the exit.
Just crouch down beside him
on the wet gravel and look.
The fog has taken most of the forest.
The water is moving without urgency.
He is still looking at what he found.
I am still learning to stay.
— Angels Are Near

The bear is sitting where a child would sit —back against the tree, legs out, facing the water.Someone put it there or l...
06/08/2026

The bear is sitting where a child would sit —
back against the tree, legs out, facing the water.
Someone put it there or left it there.
Either way it has been there long enough
to look settled. To look like it belongs.
The worn plush of it, the slight forward tilt
of the head, the small fixed expression
that does not change no matter what the weather does.
I used to dream you were still here.
I would wake inside the dream convinced —
the particular warmth of it, the weight of it,
the way the dream let me stop bracing —
and then the room would come back.
Its specific emptiness. Its morning light.
The ceiling I have memorized
in the seconds before I remember.
The bear doesn't dream. It just waits.
Whatever it was given to hold —
the child's need, the adult's grief —
it holds without knowing it is holding.
The mist off the water is soft this morning.
The tree above the bear is wide and gray.
The bear's eyes are open and unchanging.
I keep thinking it must be cold out there.
— Angels Are Near

He doesn't know yet what this moment costs.That is the mercy of being the age he is.He is standing at the edge of the wa...
06/07/2026

He doesn't know yet what this moment costs.
That is the mercy of being the age he is.
He is standing at the edge of the water
in a gray hoodie, watching the horizon,
and above him and to the right
a white butterfly moves through the warm haze —
small enough to miss
if you are not already looking for something.
He is not looking for it.
He is just looking.
That is the difference between his age
and mine: he is still looking without needing.
And I understand now what I failed to understand
when I was standing where he's standing —
that every ordinary moment has a price
that you only find out later at the register.
I would go back. That is the truth.
I would stand in every unremarkable moment
and be unremarkably present in it,
knowing what the bill would come to.
The butterfly moves through the upper right
of his sky, indifferent and exact.
He will remember this day or he will not.
Either way, the moment is already becoming.
— Angels Are Near

Her face is in the clouds.I don't mean that as comfort — I mean it literally.The soft profile, the closed eyes,the way h...
06/07/2026

Her face is in the clouds.
I don't mean that as comfort — I mean it literally.
The soft profile, the closed eyes,
the way her features emerged from the gray-white
the way a memory surfaces
without warning in the middle of something else —
present before you have time
to prepare for the arriving of it.
She is not looking down.
Her eyes are closed in the particular way
of someone who has set something heavy
down and will not pick it up again.
And that is where I feel her.
Not in the grief. Inside the release of it.
The moment just after the weight lifts —
the breath that fills the space where the weight was.
I have been learning this slowly:
that presence does not require
the thing I lost to come back.
It requires only the opening.
Her face dissolves back into cloud
the longer I look. That is the nature of it.
She is in the texture of the air —
the part that holds without being held.
— Angels Are Near

The bench has room for twoand I am only using half of it.That is the specific arithmeticof this particular night —the ba...
06/07/2026

The bench has room for two
and I am only using half of it.
That is the specific arithmetic
of this particular night —
the bare tree to my left, the moon
pushing its light across the water,
the cold coming up through the slats
the way cold always finds a way in.
I used to know what to do with a night like this.
She would have known what to say
about the moon on the water —
something practical and true at the same time,
the way she said everything.
That is the part that doesn't translate.
The way her voice held two things at once —
the weight of a thing and its brightness.
The light on the water is doing that now.
Both. Simultaneously.
Heavy silver and cold luminescence
laid across the dark in one long line.
I sit with my hands in my lap
and the empty half of the bench beside me.
The moon doesn't move. The water does.
I am trying to learn which one to be.
— Angels Are Near

Address

8003 2nd Avenue West
Bradenton, FL
34209

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Angels Are Near posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category