An angel got stuck in the ceiling.
That’s how it starts.

Not a glorious, oil-painted angel,
just a sketch with tired wings,
hovering in neon lilac sky
above a crowd that forgot
it was a crowd.

The wings are mostly marker strokes,
the kind you draw in a hurry
on the corner of a meeting agenda
while someone says “synergy”
for the fourth time.
But here they are doctrine:
two flapping parentheses
around a face that looks
suspiciously like your tired neighbour.

Below, the people.

They lean left, they lean right,
they lean into their phones,
into each other’s half sentences,
into the invisible announcements
only they can hear.

No one looks up.
That would require neck muscles
and a belief in verticality.

Paradise, apparently,
is an angle of the spine
we no longer practice.

Instead we have this:

beige jackets,
turquoise shadows,
cheeks shaded with supermarket pink,
bodies crosshatched in hurry.

It could be a train station,
a refugee line,
a festival queue,
a waiting room for results
we don’t want to read.

The background is all bubblegum apocalypse:
mint green, highlighter yellow,
the kind of pink you see in candy
and warning signs.

Someone clearly ordered too much color
and decided to pour the surplus
over this scene,
just to see what would happen
if suffering came in pastel.

Paradise lost,
but the palette stays cheerful.

In the middle, a tall figure bends forward,
carrying an invisible weight
the way people carry responsibility:
in the shoulders first,
then in the silence.

Around them, talk balloons
that never got drawn:

“You go ahead, I’ll catch up.”
“I’m fine, just tired.”
“It’s only temporary.”
“It’s been temporary for years.”

The angel up there
tries to file a status report.

Subject: Eden,
Current Location: Misplaced.

Under “description of incident”
the angel scribbles:

– tree upgraded to cell tower
– snake outsourced to algorithm
– apple rebranded as lifestyle choice
– knowledge turned into notification.

The form bounces back:
“Insufficient detail. Please attach screenshots.”

The angel sighs in fluorescent gold.
The wings blur a little at the edges,
like someone smudged hope
with an unwashed thumb.

On the ground, a kid (or maybe just
a shorter swirl of lines)
looks sideways toward an exit
that isn’t there.

They are the only one
whose outline is still elastic,
not yet stiffened
into job titles and joint pain.

Paradise for them
is still a moving target:
a ball, a puddle,
a patch of grass no one has claimed.

For the others,
paradise has been moved
to the upper shelf of memory,
behind the box labeled
“Stuff I’ll Think About When Things Calm Down.”

Spoiler:
things never calm down.

The floor is drawn
in indecisive gray.
It could be concrete,
could be cloud.

Everyone stands on it
as if it were certain,
even while the colors underneath
whisper alternatives:

sea,
forest,
street that belongs to people
instead of traffic.

Paradise lost,
yes,
but also misfiled,
mislabeled,
misunderstood
as a location
instead of a relation.

The angel knows this.
Or remembers,
vaguely,
from a previous posting.

Back then, paradise
was not gated property
but a way bodies
occupied space together
without fear surplus.

Nobody measured productivity,
only ripeness.
No one asked for passwords,
only names of trees.

Now the angel watches
as we line up for security checks,
for job interviews,
for Black Friday doors to open,
and wonders how we managed
to make urgency
our main religion.

Someone in the crowd sneezes.
Three people say “Bless you”
out of pure habit.

For half a second
the corridor becomes liturgy:
a tiny, automatic ritual
where care slips through
the cracks of schedule.

The angel circles that second
three times in the air,
highlighter-yellow halo,
and files it under
“Remaining Evidence.”

Because paradise is not gone,
not really.

It’s just been chopped into moments.
Microscopic, unprofitable moments.

A stranger holding a door
without looking annoyed.
A shared joke
about the broken ticket machine.
Someone moving their bag
so you can sit.

Little rebellions
against optimized indifference.

In the drawing,
you can almost see them:

tiny gaps in the crosshatching
where the line hesitated,
where the hand softened,
where the marker bled
a little kinder than expected.

Paradise lost, yes,
as system, as guarantee,
as brochure.

But paradise still flickers
in these low-resolution gestures,
blurry but persistent,
like an old screensaver
the computer forgot to delete.

The angel tilts its head,
wings rustling in felt-tip sound.

Maybe, it thinks,
my job description is wrong.

Maybe I’m not here
to escort anyone back
to some mythic garden,

but to underline,
in neon,

every tiny scene
where humans accidentally
treat each other
like they belong.

The crowd keeps moving,
streaks of beige and teal and doubt.

No trumpets,
no flaming sword,
just a squeaky marker
and a sky the color of
spilled highlighter.

Paradise lost?
Sure.

But also—
paradise constantly misplaced
and constantly rediscovered,

for a heartbeat,
in the middle of
this messy,
marker-drawn queue
we call
life.