Marseille

Leo

When someone arrives and makes you believe in angels, it's easy to forget that they were once a human being too.

The first time that Barbie saw Leo he was wearing white, not the blinding kind, but a soft worn cotton tee shirt. He had on blue jeans and a watch. She thought he was a trick of the sun, something that the heat had pulled from her memory. But when he walked right towards her with a smile, it was like someone had opened a window in a room that had been stifling.

We all stumble through this world. No one ever gets it exactly right. There are people who glow with an inner light and you forget that they too are made of flesh and flaw.

That's how it was with him.

He looked at her like she was a song half remembered.

He found her by the sea that night, at the end of a long pier staring out into the distance brooding on being mortal, breakable and lost.

He was a beautiful concept—like sugar melting on the tongue before you realize it was never meant to last.

There was a carousel nearby with chipped paint horses that whinnied when the wind blew just right in season. Barbie had pink bubble gum hair that was heavy and damp from the salt air of the bay. She thought he looked like something out of an old bedtime story. A fable that her grandmother had recited at night. It wasn't a story of dragons or kingdoms. It was a story with an ending that never quite closed.

"comment s'appelle?" Barbie asked. And he said his name like it was borrowed, like he hadn't used it in a very long time.

Leo said with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, "Vous-vous souvenez de moi?"

"Ca va?" Barbie replied, suddenly shy and turning from his gaze—afraid to cry. The memory is there like a hush between heartbeats. What was forgotten is born anew.

But angels don't cry.

He said things that made the stars seem closer. He never flinched through her questioning. He only replied in his own way because he was aching, hurting, trying.

He walked barefoot through her discomfort like it was a meadow and not a minefield. And slowly, gently, Barbie began to think the world wasn't made of endings.

He told her a story of how he once stood in the rain for an hour beside a woman who forgot how to breathe after her son died. He didn't speak. He just stood there with her, silent and strong, soaking in the grief like the sadness needed a witness.

The last time she'd seen him he'd said her name like it hurt. Furious.

And just like that, she remembered that: angels fall.

But they also stay. Even when they're tired. Even when that inner light begins to flicker in their chest.

He stayed.

And Barbie learned to stop worshiping him.

She learned to hold his hands and remind him what it meant to believe.