Brown-Eyed Boy

I knew Alex Cashin from the day he was born until the day he killed himself. I was there for every tiny, insignificant moment of his life - when he first learned to pee standing up and saw it in his young mind as the most impressive feat known to man. When he got drunk at a cousin's wedding on three glasses of champagne because he'd forgotten to eat anything. When Lauren Dempsey dragged him into the back room of her dad's chippie to fumble with his belt and force hot, fervent kisses on his neck.

He was a Virgo, born on the first day of September. He had brown eyes and when he was seventeen he went to a dodgy tattooist, lied about his age, and got his parents' initials scripted on his shoulder.

His father was a Turk, his mother a Greek Cypriot. The Montagues and Capulets of first generation immigrants. Maybe a child born to a forbidden love never stood a real chance. Maybe that was what Alex saw when he looked in the mirror right after trying his first line of cocaine. What I saw was the little boy who could barely contain his delight at peeing standing up. I saw the same kid when Alex injected himself with poor quality heroin, and it broke my heart. That was only the first of many times that his story nearly came to a premature end.

Guardian angels aren't really supposed to experience emotions like hate, but to this day I despise the group that Alex fell in with. Their leader, whose bullying prompts of "come on, Cash, it's harmless" led to my beautiful boy's heart drowning in its own blood. And what kind of guardian was I, to watch over him as he slowly and surely destroyed himself?

The worst thing is, I saw the future that Alex could have had. If he'd never gone to that party and met those people. He'd be in his second year of uni, he'd have a girlfriend called Sita, another product of racially starcrossed lovers. By the time they were both twenty-one he would have proposed and she would have said yes and their first child would be a boy called Ali, with beautiful brown eyes and smooth dark skin. But that child will never be born, so now I watch over a newborn girl named Amy, also a brown-eyed Virgo. I live with her night and day, and it is a life of tremendous hope and crushing fear.

A/N: I wrote this immediately after watching Luc Besson's beautiful film 'Angel-A'. It was also partially inspired by the short story 'Recording Angel' which can be found on this site, under the author Red Masque.