The Soul Keeper

My job wasn’t exactly easy. It was hard watching people fall apart, but I always knew that end I was helping someone for the bigger picture. Sometimes though, I just think I can’t take one more piece of someone’s soul.

I guess I should explain further.

As a child, a lot of really bad things happened to me, the more that happened, the more empty I began to feel. When I was 17 I spent every day in my room, lights off, laying on my back, staring at the darkness where my ceiling would be. One day my brother came in, sitting on the corner of my bed. He took a deep breath and whispered “You spend hours in here doing nothing Gerard, what are you doing?” I just simply said “I am imaging what it’s like to be dead.” I think he may have started crying, but I had taken a lot of something and I can’t recall it now. Fast forward 3 years and I’m worse. The sky was foggy and it was really cold, that’s all I remember about the day I died. Oh yeah, and one more other thing, on the ferry ride to work, I watched the World Trade Center collapse.

Though it was tasking, what I did was important. I was a “Guardian Angel” of some sort. I don’t have wings, a halo, or any spectacular glow around me, but I was a supernatural “helper”. We only adopted that term when the living began to say it. The job was simple, collect people’s souls so they can have it in a time of need.There are only two times a Soul Keeper will visit you. If you have ever had anything bad happen to you then you are familiar with this feeling. Your stomach drops, and your chest twists, you swear it is hard to breathe and you start feeling like there is something actually leaving your body, your chest begins to feel emptier, but heavier, and for a while after that, you aren’t the same; usually you are more quiet, more distant. You see, when you were breaking down, we come down and catch that little piece of your soul you lost that day. We don’t actually keep it in a jar, but I am sure that it is easier for a human to understand than where we really keep it. The second time your “Guardian Angel” will visit you is when you are losing hope in living. When you feel completely empty, and you are walking through like a zombie, and you can barely wake up in the morning, life starts to feel more like purgatory, and the exit seems so beautiful, all covered in pretty face-paint. So you are walking towards it. Your fingers are almost touching the door handle, minutes, seconds away from your Nirvana. You are so ready for it. It is our job to throw water on the exit, let that face paint wash away into a memory and show you what the exit really looks like.We get a since of uneasiness and deep uncomfortableness when you start to feel that way. This alerts us that one of our human’s needs us. We go to you and “open the jar” giving you back a small piece of your soul. We either take or give. I’m positive it’s happened to you. Sometimes when you cry you feel empty afterwards, but I’m sure after one specifically horrible time, you all the sudden felt empowered, you felt invisible. You just got granted back a piece your soul. Humans cannot see us when we come to them, and the cycle continues until they die. Your Guardian can’t physically save or warn you of things that may happen to you. The job has its perks, but it hurts a lot of the time as well. It was all worth it in the end though.

Roaming the streets was something I did often to pass uneventful time. This street was what many human’s would consider ‘creepy’. The fog was thick enough to be smoke instead, I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. My breaths were calm and even as always. Guardians only get uneasiness when their assigned humans are in trouble. I was surprised when all the sudden I felt nervous, the pit of my stomach clenching and twisting. ‘Someone must be in trouble’ I thought. Sure enough, I was transported into a room a few seconds later.
Small enough to be a bit cramped, but big enough to be comfortable, the baby blue room was actually soothing. Posters of other humans cluttered the walls, many of them familiar to me from my living times. They say I should feel lucky about this, they say not everyone gets to do this, but I always hated only remembering the tiniest bits from my time of life. My eyes scanned the room until I found my human. Even though I didn’t know him, information about him filtered into my mind. It was like pulling a mental file out from the attic, a few layers of dust, but still useful. Frank Iero I recalled. I had visited him for the preserving of his soul 4 times, but I had never given him any back in his record so far. He was a really small kid, all hunched up on the corner of his gray comforter adorned bed. His face was scrunched up as he was looking at a bottle of Ambien, most likely the poor boy was wondering if taking the entire bottle will kill him. He was really pretty. I always thought that about my humans. I really loved them all. He was a beautiful little thing, and I didn’t want to have him go. Just as I reached towards my pocket to get his soul ‘jar’ he looked up at me, looking to me dead in the eyes as if he could see me. I felt a chill shake through my entire body. Humans couldn’t see Soul Keepers, why was he staring right at me? He closed his eyes and took a large breath, “If there is someone out there, someone who cares. Like a god, or angel, something, someone, anywhere- please give me a sign. Anything. Please. I can’t fucking think anymore. I can’t remember anything I do or care about. I can’t breathe or feel or talk without wanting to jump out a 5 story building and it hurts so badly” his voice cracks during the last bit of his sentence. I see a tear escape his clamped-shut eyes. The second time he speaks, it is barely above a whisper, his voice wrecked “I-I can’t take it. Minutes run into hours, hours run into days, days run into weeks, weeks run into months, months into years. Everything is meaningless.” The boy is now crying- sobbing actually, tears running a steady stream down his olive skin. “Please, God, someone tell me life gets better than this.”I open my mouth and close it a few times. This was the most bizarre thing to ever happen to me. My heart was racing for the first time in my dead life. I didn’t know what to do. I opened up his ‘jar’ and let two tragedies worth of soul escape. I watched it twirl and spin, dancing in the glory of its freedom. It went into his mouth, but nothing happened really. Usually this was the part when the human’s eyes twinkled, and they got up and did something big, but instead, as if I had only given the human ¼ of a soul, just sat down the pills as if they no longer were of interest, but he looked no happier. My stomach sunk and I pondered what to do. I decided stepping out of the norm was necessary sometimes. Gulping in a big breath of air, I walked over to the bed and kneeled behind the boy, and enveloped him in a hug. His shoulders hitched up in shock and fear but soon relaxed. I kissed him on the cheek and stood again, casting one last glance to my restored human. He looked confused but happy, fingers lingering on his stubbly cheek where I had kissed him. I smiled and then I was gone, but I never ever forgot him.

Sometimes when I think of him, I swear I can almost feel my own heartbeat again.

Notes

I'll just kind of leave this here.