Micah

The first time I saw Micah, he was talking to a pigeon.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he told it, standing under the bus shelter awning while the rain came down in sheets, “I’m just saying the croissant is not gluten-free.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He glanced at me as if I’d just arrived to a party, only he and the pigeon were invited to.

“Hey,” he said, holding out half his umbrella. “You look like you could use an upgrade from ‘damp’ to ‘less damp.’”

“I don’t talk to birds,” I said, stepping under the umbrella.

“Good,” he said. “They gossip.”

We walked in that ridiculous bubble of shelter, hip to hip. The rain made confetti of the streetlights. I felt something settle over me -- quiet, like when a church goes from murmuring to a single bell. It was a strange feeling for someone who, five minutes prior, had been swearing at a vending machine for eating her dollar.

“I’m Mara,” I said.

“Micah,” he said. “Professional bird debater. Amateur umbrella sharer.”

“Do you do this with all women? Offer shelter and then charm them with crumbs-based moral debates?”

“Only on Tuesdays,” he said. “And days the world looks like it’s drowning.”

We ended up at a diner, the kind with cracked vinyl seats and waitresses who call you honey with the authority of queens. He asked my order like it was a test; I asked about his life like it wasn’t.

“I work at the shelter around the corner,” he said. “Night shifts mostly.”

“Why nights?”

He sipped his coffee. “It’s when the stories get loud.”

I didn’t believe in angels, not the winged kind anyways. I’m a realist, the type who color-codes calendars and Googles symptoms and believes in things like deadlines and potholes. But I felt it -- a thrum of goodness from this man who split his toast with pigeons and handed umbrellas to strangers.

“Is that a ministry?” I asked. The word tasted unfamiliar.

“It’s a place,” he said carefully. “We try to make it a soft one.”

He wasn’t preachy. If anything, his faith sat inside him like a warm stone, quiet and dense. I left the diner with his number on a receipt and the ridiculous idea that something had been decided for me long before I could vote on it.

“Text me if you need more umbrella,” he said, holding the door.

“I think I’m all set,” I said.

“Everyone says that,” he said, and in the softness of his smile I saw the truth: he knew people break.

We fell into a rhythm -- late-night walks after his shift, coffee in paper cups, stories traded like secrets. He could find a gentle joke in anything. He also got tired, bone-tired, like the weight he carried was heavier than his frame knew what to do with. He never hid it.

One night he told me he used to drink like his life depended on it. “It almost did,” he said. “Until it didn’t.”

“That’s the weakness part, right?” I asked, trying to make it conversational and failing. “The… lessons?”

He blinked. “What lessons?”

“There’s this… okay, don’t laugh.” I stared at my shoes. “When I met you, it felt like I finally understood something I’d always mocked. Like maybe God assigns people -- before we’re even born -- to tether us to what’s true. Like you’d been… I don’t know. Given to me. And I was given to you.”

He didn’t laugh. He reached for my hand. “I think God is good at giving,” he said.

“Even if -- ”

“Even if we’re a mess,” he said.

I wanted to call him an angel and hated how much of a cliché it sounded in my head. I didn’t believe in angels. But I believed in him.

Then my father got sick. And I ran.

I’m good at running. I move apartments, I switch gyms, I block numbers when conversations get too honest. Micah noticed. “Where are you?” he texted, night after night. I left him on read.

One week turned into two. Hospital beeps became a soundtrack. My father, who had never prayed out loud in his life, whispered, “Lord, be near,” and I pretended not to hear him.

Micah didn’t force my door. He sent me groceries by way of the teenage neighbor with purple hair. He left a note once -- three lines: “I’m here. I’m praying. Rest.”

And then when my father died, the world became a sinkhole. I sat in my kitchen at 2 a.m. with a cold cup of tea and a tighter chest than I knew a body could hold. I dialed Micah because there was nobody else I trusted to hear what I couldn’t say.

He picked up on the first ring. “Mara?”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“Breathe,” he said. “And let me come sit with you.”

He arrived damp, empty-handed except for his whole self. He didn't fill the silence with scripture or platitudes. He made toast. He watched me breathe. At some point, he began to talk in low tones, not to me, but the way people read a letter they’ve memorized.

“When I first got sober,” he said, “I asked God to send someone who could see me, not the mess. I thought He’d send a mentor or something. He sent a girl at a bus stop who laughed at me and shared my umbrella. I’ve believed stranger things.”

I looked at him then. His face was tired and open. He looked like a mortal -- frail and earnest and desperately alive.

“I ran from you,” I said. “Because if I let you be… this. If I let you be my person, and you left, I didn’t think I’d survive.”

“I’m not an angel,” he said. “I forget to eat and sometimes I’m petty and I have a scar on my heart the shape of a whiskey bottle.” He smiled a little. “But I know how to stay.”

“Promise?” My voice broke.

“I promise to try,” he said. “Every day.”

I wanted guarantees. God doesn’t give those. He gives people.

We started showing up for each other in small ways: lists on refrigerators, alarms labeled “drink water,” voice memos that said “I saw a dog that looked like a comet.” We fought, too, like humans do. The first big fight was about money; the second was about whether my cynicism was a personality trait or a shield. He never called me names. I sometimes raised my voice. After, we went for walks and counted cracks in the sidewalk like sacraments.

One Sunday, in a circle of folding chairs at the shelter, a woman named Ruth said, “Tell us what you’re grateful for.” Micah said, “Coffee.” Then he looked at me and added, “And assignments that look like accidents.”

Outside, I elbowed him. “You called me an accident.”

“I called you my assignment,” he said. “I think God made me your student and your guardrail. I think you were sent to make me brave.”

“Guardrail?” I snorted. “You are five-foot-ten and extremely human.”

“Very human,” he agreed. “And still -- ”

“And still,” I said, because I felt it. The quiet again. The bell.

Months later, standing under the same awning where we met, Micah glanced at a pigeon and then at me, grinning. “I maintain you’re not gluten-free,” he told it. To me, he said, “Marry me.”

I laughed, cried, said, “You didn’t even ask.”

He dropped to one knee with a dramatic sigh. “Mara, will you -- ”

“Yes,” I said, before fear could write another script.

At our tiny wedding, Ruth read aloud the words I’d scribbled once and hid in my desk: “I never really believed in angels. I thought they were beings of myth and imagination. Until God made you my angel. Before I was born, He assigned you to me, and me to you. And the first time I saw you, I felt the beauty and goodness of your soul, the humbleness of your faith. Even though you manifested as a mere mortal man with weaknesses to overcome and lessons to teach me, I always knew -- even when I ran from you -- that you were special. You were different. You were my true love. We were meant to be. My angel mine.”

Micah squeezed my hand. “I am yours,” he whispered.

“And I am yours,” I said, all the running gone. The rain outside began, gentle as a blessing. The bell in my chest rang once, then again, until it was everywhere.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

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