Can You Imagine?

• Marie-claire Dunn, Grade 10, Aquinas College
• Short Story
• 2011

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

Can you imagine? They’d ask me. No, I can’t and I never will. I was born an angel. I don’t know what it is to be human. I know the science of it, veins arteries, skin, DNA, but I have never experienced it myself.

So I don’t answer. Instead I go back to watching the humans as they all rush about their lives, rarely taking time to step back and realise that if they did everything would slow down and become far less stressful.

But some of them were more like angels than I realised a human could be. They were kind, helpful and loving. They stood by their friends and fought for their defense even if the battle was already lost. They had faith, and they had hope and love.

They also had futures. Something angels didn’t have. We are eternally in existence but we do not have the same definition of ‘future’ as humans. For them the future meant aging and getting older, achieving a career, having a family and inevitably dying. That was ‘future’ for them.
For us the future was the same as our existence now. We would watch and wait until a time when we were needed arose.

“Elijah, are you still watching them? You do nothing else these days.”
I looked away from the pool of water where the human world was depicted. My brother, Michael approached with graceful strides.

“Why do you spend your time by the pool, instead of with your brothers?”
I glanced at the calm, motionless water and felt-what humans would call-a smile, twitch on my lips but it was gone a second later.

“They’re so flawed and emotional, I wish I understood them,” I stated, knowing it hardly counted as an explanation.

Michael stayed silent, although confusion and buried agreement shone in his eyes.

“And yet I see why the father loves them so. I see so many possibilities for each of them and when they do not take them it saddens me. They have so much potential and some of them waste it. They make bad choices and good ones and each lead them to a new destiny that was never written for them. And I wish, I wish I knew what it was like.”

Something indiscernible flashed through Michael’s eyes and he stared past me, at the pool, in thought.

“You wish to be human,” it was a statement not a question.

I shook my head at his assumption. “I do not wish to be human, I wish to have the memories of being a human, to experience it for a day but I don’t want a lifetime. I don’t believe we angels are meant to even try to have a lifetime as one. We wouldn’t be able to cope, it is not our purpose, but if I was among them for just a day maybe I’d be able to understand. What I want to understand I do not know?”

But being human is more than I could imagine…because I never was one.