I want you to picture a room. It doesn't really matter what; just imagine it as the sort of room that's more a retreat, a refuge, than a sleeping place. There's a bed, of course, maybe some posters on the wall; childhood toys arranged neatly in little ranks on the desk and a shelf of books, colorful in their order, flanking the bed.

Got that? It's all right. Take a few minutes, if you have to, to get that image in your head; I can wait.

Now in that room, there's a young man, crying. A scatter of olive-green clothing spilling out of a backpack on the bed; little stars-and-stripes checked on the thick quilt his grandmother made for him nestled around his shoulders. Just one close-cropped head of hair, brown eyes rimmed with red, and tears. Salt drips down his cheeks, shoulders shaking in the slight chill, his knees drawn up to his chest.

You're probably wondering why he's crying, right? Or stopped reading there. It doesn't matter. You've probably stopped reading ages ago, given that there's no sign of bimbos or improbably single CEOs lusting after secretaries in pencil skirts; no lurid fantasies of rutting in a supply closet or feeling the first tender kss of youth.

I'm sorry. It's not that sort of story.

He's crying for an angel, if you wanted to know. Every muscle in his body hurts, sometimes. Shakes, even, with a helpless sadness that underneath the mistletoe, there's just him. Maybe he should reach out and let the same fire fill him as when he calmly issues orders- there's no barking, not for the good ones- or steps onto a plane or does any one of a million other things. Maybe he should, right?

That angel might be one he saw in a dream, months passing in the night as he slept, a gentle blue glow suffusing his dream and tears dripping down his face as he saw her, in the soft still white of a fresh snowfall. It's been a "year," to the day, since that dream ended. He should've known; he had months to figure it out, realize it wasn't real, but he knelt in the snow and pulled out a ring and looked at the woman who had made him the happiest-

And the dream ended.

Maybe the angel sending tears coursing down his cheeks is someone he's yet to meet. Maybe that rustle outside his window isn't a tree scraping on the glass, but an angel's wings. Maybe all the stories that flow out of him are just a sad, stupid attempt to capture his dreams again, to feel that warmth in his heart that seems impossible to capture in his grasp for real. All those stories- books and angels and Death himself in a silent parade across the echoes of his mind. Maybe they should go, sink down to the deep, black dark with him, and sleep forever in the hope that the dream will return.

But maybe not.

Are you picturing that room, the man, the soft rustle, there? If you are, maybe you can imagine an angel, too. Maybe that angel has an easy smile and short hair and clipped wings, slapping him upside the head and telling him it'll be all right. Maybe she's all softness and light and warmth and kindness, telling him he can rest in her arms for a while.

Hell, maybe the angel's a brother, a sister he never had, taking him by the belt and dragging him the last meters through a storm of mud and lead inside his brain.

Maybe it's you.