The heavy feeling weighs on her like a stone she carries close to her chest that nothing lifts and no one sees. There is sits and majestically holds place, pushing down the joy that this day would have, should have brought. Angela, what a beautiful name. How inappropriate for one so slow to love, so slow to embrace anything other than the stone.

She had often wondered why she was not the angel of her name. When she was very young she tried hard to be an angel. Mama called her my angel, but she could never be. The sorrow started too close to cognition for Angela to remember its exact coming. Her musing about the hereafter and her place in it was so much of her that she was startled when anyone else was not aware of the fleeting aspect of life. Angela had one foot here and one foot hereafter, and she longed to be one place or the other.