When I Met My Guardian Angel

If you’ve been reading me, you already know I’m not normal. So I’ll tell you a story that isn’t normal, and I’ll tell you upfront that it’s completely true, and I’ll also tell you — because this is the kind of thing that requires full disclosure — that I have never taken drugs, not once, not for any moral reason but simply because I’ve always known what losing control of myself could mean and have never been willing to find out. I’ve never been a drinker. I’ve never smoked. I don’t take sleeping pills. I have never taken psychiatric medication, though I’ve used it on my father in ways the prescribing physicians didn’t exactly intend. I was, that evening, entirely sober, entirely present, and entirely unprepared for what happened.

I was twenty. A few months out of the army, in that specific stretch of early adulthood where everything that was supposed to improve hasn’t yet, where the life you were supposed to be building is still mostly theoretical, and where the exhaustion isn’t the exhaustion of doing too much but of having had to fight so hard, for so long, for things most people receive without noticing they’ve received them.

I was waiting for a friend at a café in the lower level of Lisbon’s largest shopping center, near the metro entrance. I’d bought a coffee. It was all I could afford to buy — I was precise about this in my own head, as you are when money is genuinely scarce: one coffee, nothing else, and I’d have to make it last until my friend arrived. I was reading a book. It was around seven in the evening.

A man approached the table.

He was tall. Black. And here’s the thing that registered immediately, before anything else: he was dressed like someone who had fallen on hard times — the clothes were worn, torn in places, the kind of outfit that communicates a specific kind of difficulty — but he carried himself with an elegance that had nothing to do with what he was wearing. The posture, the movement, the way he reached for the back of the chair across from me — it was the bearing of someone from a different century, a nineteenth-century gentleman who had, for reasons unclear, ended up in a shopping center in Lisbon in worn-out clothes.

He asked, politely, if he could sit down.

I want to note something about my reaction, because it’s the first strange thing: I should have said no. I was not a person who welcomed strangers, particularly strangers who approached me in public spaces and asked to join me. I read threat quickly, and I responded to it accordingly, and my default toward unknown people was a wariness that had been built over years and that didn’t soften easily. I looked at this man and felt none of that. Not trust exactly — something more neutral than trust, an absence of the usual alarm, a sense that whatever this was, it wasn’t a threat.

I said: sure, please do.

He sat down. And then he asked if I’d buy him a coffee.

I told him I was sorry, I couldn’t — I genuinely didn’t have any money left, and I’d have bought him one if I had. I said it without embarrassment, because it was simply true.

He smiled. Not the smile of someone managing disappointment. A warm smile, an understanding one, the smile of someone who already knew the answer before asking the question.

And then he said: I know. You’ve been going through a lot.

I want to stop here, because this is where the story stops being explainable in any ordinary register.

He was a stranger. I had never seen him before. There was nothing visible about me that afternoon that communicated anything specific about my circumstances — I was a young man reading a book in a café, which is not a tableau that announces its financial or emotional content. And yet he said I know. You’ve been going through a lot with the specific confidence of someone reporting a fact they already had access to, not guessing at something they couldn’t see.

I said: yes. That’s very true.

And he said: You’ll be okay, son. Don’t worry.

I didn’t answer. I was in shock in the specific way that shock sometimes arrives — not dramatic, not loud, just a complete suspension of the ordinary processing, everything quiet, nothing quite connecting. I was present and I was also somewhere else, and I couldn’t have told you, in that moment, which one was more real.

He looked at me, and then he said: You know who I am?

I said: No. I’m sorry, I don’t.

He said: I’m your guardian angel.

He stood up. He re-arranged the chair behind him — carefully, precisely, the way someone does when they were raised to leave a space as they found it. He walked around the left side of the table. He passed close by me, and as he did, he put his left hand on my shoulder for a moment — briefly, lightly — and continued walking.

I turned to watch him go.

Behind me was a massive pillar, and the shadow it cast was deep, and he walked into that shadow.

And then he wasn’t there.

I got up immediately. I looked. I checked both directions, the shadow, the area around the pillar, the path toward the metro entrance. There was no one. He was not there. A tall man in torn clothing with the bearing of a nineteenth-century gentleman does not disappear into a crowded shopping center in the time it takes to turn your head — and even if he had, I should have been able to see him, somewhere, moving away. There was nothing.

My friend arrived twenty minutes later. I didn’t tell him. Who would believe it? I barely believed it, and I’d been there.

A few months later, things improved. Not tremendously — I want to be honest about that, because you’ll be okay in my life has always meant something specific, a level of okay that doesn’t look like much from outside but represents something real from inside. I went back to college. I dove deeper into the animal rights work I’d been building. The life I was living became, by degrees, a little more like the life I was supposed to be building. Not transformed. Improved. Survivable in a different way than it had been.

He wasn’t wrong.

I don’t know what to make of this.

I have never known. I’ve turned it over many times, across many years, in many different contexts, and I’ve never arrived at an explanation that fully accounts for all of it — the specific knowledge of what I was going through, the disappearance, the hand on the shoulder, the calm I felt in his presence that I’ve felt in almost no other stranger.

I’ll say this: if he was my guardian angel, I imagine he’s probably not very proud of me. The ledger is what the ledger is, and I’m not going to pretend it’s clean. And I’ll go further — if he was, he seems to have quit at some point, because I’ve never felt I had one. The life that followed that café didn’t feel particularly guarded. It felt like what it always felt like: a lot of fighting, a lot of weight, a lot of mornings that required everything just to get through.

And yet. Here I am. With two hundred animals in the Colombian mountains and a body of work I didn’t know was coming and a wife who chose this life with me. Still here, against the specific odds of a life like this one.

You’ll be okay, son.

He said it once. He said it to a twenty-year-old with no money left after a coffee, waiting for a late friend, reading a book in the lower level of a shopping center in Lisbon.

I think, by the standards available to someone like me, he was right.

I just wish I’d had a chance to tell him so.

This experience sits at the center of the spiritual journey told in full in La Santa Muerte: The Only One Who Showed Up — a man searching, across many years, for something real to hold onto, and what he eventually found.