Little Lost Angel

By Jessica Lake

Hi, I’m Jessica.

Do you already know me? And my wonderful adventures? Where I am in my life? Please, if you do, skip over this part.

Jessica in Cameo

I had spent my life comparing myself to other girls. Not one in particular. A perfectly ordinary one.

Let us call her the Girl Next Door — GND.

GND was a doozy. She knew exactly what she wanted and would fight tooth and nail for it. And when she had to, she didn’t mind stepping on a few toes.

The GND knew her worth and would settle for nothing less. She kept reminding her boyfriend how lucky he was. She pictured the two of them with grandchildren, more in love than ever.

At work, she deserved that goddamn promotion. When she did not get it, she made sure everyone knew she had been cheated.

It was ages ago, yet the aroma of the chocolate frosting on her birthday cake remains.

She really misses her big brother away at college.

The flame of that first kiss pulls her back to the memory of that boy.

I ask you:

Who wouldn’t want to be her?

The GND was confident, courteous, demanding, willful, feminine, and desirable.

She was at home within herself.

Most importantly, that babe was everything I was not.

So I chose her as my exemplar.

All girls are created equal, right? Hard work, smarts, and persistence win the day, am I right?

Girl Next Door

A lifetime later, I learned I had been doubly wrong.

Turns out, the GND had been created a little more equal. And I couldn’t put in what Nature left out.

By the time I played the hand Nature dealt me, I had passed and failed every single pop quiz in a girl’s fabulous life.

I flunked.

Big time.

I fell apart.

Sought therapy.

It took three long years to figure out where I screwed up.

I hadn’t—

Screwed up.

I came into this life blessed with many gifts. Lamentably, I was meant for a Better World than this. For here in the Wicked World, each gift brought a curse.

August 2026

This morning I woke with the feeling that I had misjudged myself.

Kipling’s Mowgli was raised among the wolf pack.

He judged himself as such.

I was raised among the neurotypical. I also judged myself by their measure.

Sadly, each comparison diminished me.

Of my many flaws, the greatest?

I would have to say that I lacked the will to say:

“Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak! I’ll go no further.” — Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

Perhaps, visible only to others, upon my forehead was traced:

PATSY

But this particular morning another possibility arose.

Hidden among the ashes of a life gone wrong—terribly wrong—there might be a grain of salvation.

Maybe—

Perhaps—

Had I been comparing myself to the wrong exemplar?

So I gave the GND bitch the boot. After which, I went looking through everything I knew for a proper fit.

Not some soul struggling to be good.

But someone good by nature.

Virtues and Frailties

I double-dog dare you.

Pick any search engine you like.

Survey religions, philosophies, and moral traditions. I bet that you will come away with a familiar cluster of virtues.

I did likewise.

I saw said cluster and thought—

Wait a second.

I know these precepts.

They are my profuse liabilities—

The shortcomings I have failed to dislodge over a lifetime.

The unanticipated insight was that what were curses here in the Wicked World might be gifts in the Better World.

Close your left eye and the parallax shifts.

What once were liabilities reveal themselves as virtues.

And the highest attainment of virtue?

Not the victory over temptation.

Never to be tempted.

That’s me!

Mostly.

I was born virtuous.

And as any morally perfected woman would, I have reservations.

If I am virtuous by nature, can I truly say that I am virtuous?

Without the sweaty struggle mano a mano with temptation, where was the moral dinero?

Christianity expressed this exactly in parable.

A shepherd deserts his ninety-nine nice sheep who never strayed to search for one naughty sheep that did.

[OMG this riles me. Say a wicked wolf should happen upon the nice ninety-nine, where the Hell is their shepherd?]

This seems to be the parable’s moral:

The naughty one gets the kudos.

The Prodigal Son gets the fatted calf.

And of the ninety-nine who behaved?

The Shepherd might answer:

“Why save the saved? Where is the spectacle of struggle? Where are the lucrative film rights? Without temptation, what is a heaven for?”

I had already asked myself the selfsame question in a poem:

Why is it
That within the eye of our spiraling doom,
We consider struggle the greater virtue…

Maybe there are many paths to perfection?

Why join virtue and struggle at the hip?

Isn’t that hypocritical?

A sage ditches temptation. Isn’t that the winning touchdown?

Why move the goalposts after the game is over?

Which begs the question: If I am morally perfected, can I really complain?

Apparently.

The Missing Piece

For quite a while I thought I lacked agency.

Wrong again.

I do have agency.

Give me a problem and I overflow with agency.

Nothing is too difficult.

I am obsessed with mastery.

I became a programmer.

I became a dancer.

I became a martial artist.

I became a writer.

I became a poet.

That is not weakness.

Though there is weakness that comes before that.

I have trouble supplying the role.

I have trouble saying:

I am hither.
I wish to be thither.
Therefore I take myself from hither to thither.

In life I am a special kind of wonderful.

Cast me on a desert island.

Would I sit helplessly on the beach?

Far from it.

Find water.

Find food.

Find shelter.

Learn to fish.

Learn to hunt.

Darn socks.

Come one morning, I realize this is home.

Why would I leave?

This is my reality now.

That is the strange thing.

I am extraordinarily capable of agency once supplied with a heading.

What I lack is the ability to direct myself.

Tommy Is a Loaded Gun

Our player is Tommy, an actor. Maybe one of the greats.

Tommy waits.

Youth does not.

Tick tock.

The phone rings.

Hamlet.

Tommy comes alive.

He obsesses.

Shakespeare.

Elizabethan.

Manners.

Oddities.

Endless rehearsals—solo or in company.

He errs.

He mopes.

He corrects.

The house lights dim.

The curtain rises.

Brooding stage center—Hamlet perfected.

And for three hours—

Hamlet struts.

He suffers.

He schemes.

He dies.

The curtain falls.

The applause rises.

The moment gone.

Tommy waits.

His youth does not.

Tick tock.

That is a play within a play about me. What happens when your greatest moments are not memorable?

I had known since I was three years old that something meaningful was missing. There is a dual personality here. Given a challenge, Tommy is magnificent. Absent that, Tommy stagnates.

What is going on here?

Tommy is reactive. On his own, his wants never rise to ambitions. The force vector must arrive from outside. Someone needs to provide the kick in the pants.

Tommy is a dynamo of possibilities. A fount of energy. Boundless desire.

His trouble is inertia.

Once settled, he is stuck.

Absent a calamity, he needs someone to shepherd him.

The shepherd has ambitions by the bucket. Achievement is his lifeblood. The dream of a lifetime.

But where is Tommy’s dream?

He learns to be grateful in another’s shining brightness.

Or better still, Tommy is a loaded gun.

Potent, explosive, monumental.

Nothing—within the proper grasp—

He can shatter the world.

Getting Real

That gave me another missing puzzle piece.

I had been staring blankly at my Wheel of Misfortune for decades.

Destabilize → Obsess → Perfect → Adapt → Stabilize

Let us talk about my lousy job.

I have a lousy job.

I mark time.

I know where everything is.

I know what is expected.

I know the rules.

I am unhappy.

Monday, I am unhappy.

Tuesday, I am unhappy.

Wednesday, I am unhappy.

But Monday’s unhappiness does not necessarily arrive on Tuesday and join hands with Tuesday’s unhappiness. The feeling does not simply pile up until one morning I have finally had enough.

I know I am unhappy.

That is a fact.

But a fact does not become more miserable merely because it has been true for years.

So I mark time.

Then I get laid off.

Now something has happened.

I destabilize.

I suffer.

I endure.

I obsess.

I solve the problem.

I find a lousy job.

I adapt.

I know the rules.

I know what is expected.

I know where everything is.

I stabilize.

I mark time.

The old job could make me unhappy for years without moving me.

One calamity could move me tomorrow.

Tell Me Who to Be

This finally gave words to something I had been writing about long before I understood it.

Destabilize ← acute negative emotion
Obsess
Perfect
Adapt → positive emotion
Stabilize

What I have enormous difficulty doing is deciding where all that magnificent machinery should take me.

Chronic dissatisfaction can tell me that something is wrong.

It does not necessarily accumulate until it supplies the force to change my life.

So direction has repeatedly arrived from outside.

Someone dear.

Someone dreaded.

A disaster.

A problem.

A role.

Tell me who to be.

Then stand back.

The words spineless, submissive, and weak disappear.

Once a direction exists, I am a superhero.

What’s missing is the Captain.

The command that sets the course.

The Girl Next Door has one.

She likes this.

She hates that.

She protects her interests.

She pursues her ambition.

Her yesterday can matter to her today. Her dissatisfaction can acquire a history. Eventually she can say:

Enough.

I flogged myself a lifetime because I was not her.

The problem here lies in my tools and not the carpenter.

I could be anybody.

But I cannot choose.

Constraint Convergence

“What I want” is not up to me.

There.

I’ve said it.

Let’s say some friends want to go to a restaurant.

Each one tosses their favorite into the fight pit.

The last one standing wins.

That way leads to friction.

My way is pacifist.

Each friend chimes in with what they don’t want.

Those are our constraints.

What cuisine don’t we want?

What ambience don’t we want?

What is too expensive?

What is too far?

In a circle, each states what they don’t want.

In time, a single restaurant emerges.

That’s Constraint Convergence.

No restaurant emerges?

Add restaurants.

Relax the constraints.

Who chose the restaurant?

Nobody.

That is the difference.

I am extraordinarily good at answering:

What works?

I am remarkably poor at answering:

What do I want?

A Fact Is an Orphan

Seems I’ve misplaced my episodic memory.

Perhaps I left it in my prior reincarnation.

SDAM — Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory.

I must cram my treasured moments elsewhere.

Knowledge holds what you know is true.

Stuff like facts, regularities, rules, principles.

Words.

It is good for words.

How the world works.

What comes before and after.

It sucks with special moments.

You see, Truth is coldly objective.

No one owns Truth.

Truth never fades.

Truth never ages.

Here are a pair of facts:

Jessica loves Luigi’s.

Paris is in France.

Both are true.

Both are sterilized.

My steady’s favorite restaurant is memory.

Mine is knowledge.

Jessica loves Luigi’s.

“Wendy’s. I want that one!”

If memory and fact got in a fight, who would win?

I’ve adapted Wendy’s.

Moral Code

My preferences don’t seem to count.

So what?

My moral code.

Morality suits semantic knowledge.

It is objective.

It is coherent.

It is extensible.

What are the facts?

Who is in the right?

Who was harmed?

Am I a moral person?

Yes.

Do I have a choice?

A little.

I flogged this dead horse in Are You Certain?

Lust arose in me.

I wanted this woman.

She is married.

Her husband is a friend.

Marriage is sacred.

This is wrong.

Where was my moral struggle?

Pssst.

There wasn’t one.

Lust sprang up.

Morality smothered it out.

Today, I look back and say:

“What are you, a priest?”

She wanted you.

You wanted her.

Adults have flings.

Adults err.

Adults regret.

And are a little glad too.

Who would hold to such a grim code?

Apparently—

Me.

I, Robot

“Morally perfected” raised an uncomfortable possibility.

I might be a robot.

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics established that a robot can behave ethically while remaining autonomous. Its morality is embedded in its substrate.

Does a robot seem virtuous?

Absolutely.

Does a robot suffer for its virtues?

I do.

Does a robot weep for its losses?

I do.

Does a robot grieve for what might have been?

I do.

Excepting Dr. Alfred Lanning’s Sonny, of course.

Thank goodness,

I am not a robot.

I still need an exemplar.

(Please don’t let me be a robot.)

Buried Alive

You are going to love this story.

Naturally, it is one of my strongest semantic reconstructions.

It is a disaster.

I was about eight years old.

I was with my big brother.

A backhoe had dug a deep trench.

We were digging tunnels into one wall.

I curved my tunnel toward his.

The bank collapsed.

My brother was buried alive.

He could not breathe.

No time for help.

No time for not panicking.

Where is he?

Probe.

Here?

Here?

A sneaker.

Where’s his head?

Dig.

Pray.

Dig.

Help!

Repeat.

Good.

He can breathe.

There is time.

Dig him out.

He is safe.

For a lifetime my memory ran this headline:

Stupid Jessica Almost Kills Brother.

I used that to condemn myself for life.

Why?

Facts are Truth.

Truth never fades.

Truth never ages.

Truth is settled.

The facts are:

I curved my tunnel.

I buried my brother.

I made the mistake.

I am stupid.

But you ask:

“What about rescuing your brother?”

Shucks. Anyone would do that.

Disaster leaves evidence and a rule.

Observance of the rule leaves nothing.

That is a corrupt moral ledger.

And mere accidents?

Truth discards the evidence.

Leaving Truth without provenance.

And when every mistake stays in the present?

You look stupid.

My Father

Until now I have spoken only ill of my father.

He was a virtuous man.

Endlessly good.

And people fleeced him.

Again and again.

I mocked him:

He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Never have so few done so much for so little.

My father, who art in New Haven, hollow be his head.

He had been loved and doted upon as an only child. He did not have my bleak grasp of the Wicked World. He remained optimistic, almost absurdly, all his life.

Before a triple bypass, a doctor asked him how he felt.

“Terrific.”

I thought my father was a fool. He refused to see that his goodness made him exploitable. And yet I never had trouble seeing that he was good.

What I said was:

“My father was made for a much better world than this.”

I could see virtue and vulnerability allied in my father.

I refused to see the same alliance in myself.

I worked to become tough.

I spent years in martial arts.

I became skilled.

I was a champion.

Only—

I was not.

I was never adversarial.

I felt only respect for my opponent.

Together we became better.

I never wanted to hurt anybody.

In a championship, I refused to take advantage of my opponent’s injury.

This Wicked World broke my spirit.

It could not make me mean, cruel, or spiteful.

It could not make me indifferent to the suffering of others.

Apollo 13

I cannot help but recount the 1970 Apollo 13 mission, a marvel of ingenuity over adversity.

The mission of Apollo 13 was to land on the Moon. More than 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded, crippling the command module’s power and life support. This forced the three astronauts into the lunar lander, designed for two. With power rationed, the interior grew cold and damp. Rising CO₂ forced them to improvise a scrubber.

The daring mission was a disaster.

The crew suffered, damp, cold, and in darkness. They endured peril, doubt, and the prospect of a horrible death.

The three made it safely home.

I was born with SDAM, which forced my autobiography into semantic memory.

A memory unable to properly encode the specificity of episodes.

My mission was to live a fulfilling human life.

Unexplained destructive behaviors ruined my life. Trying and failing to correct them compounded my suffering. I could neither accept what I needed from others nor give them what they needed from me. This left me alone, lonely, fatigued, crushed, exasperated, and empty.

After some seventy years, I learned that these deficiencies were fundamental to my nervous system.

I had lived a tormented folly.

I had been trapped in a self-destructive cycle that could not be broken.

I had failed every milestone of my mission.

At seventy, I knew my life as a plague of disasters and scattered precious moments.

A life written only in knowledge.

To heal, I had to abandon all hope.

Little Lost Angel

What sort of exemplar feels life’s vicissitudes deeply but is void of temptation?

I threw my net wide into the Ocean of Knowledge.

And look what she yielded.

The Little Lost Angel —

1953 story by Janet Field Heath, illustrations by Janet Laura Scott.

My forgotten, beloved childhood atrocity!

A parable carved in semantic stone!

What better exemplar for a 19% Native American boy than a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl angel!

Strip away the treacle of the crown, harp, wings, immortality, omniscience, and the supernatural—

What remains?

A common earth girl destined for a woman’s hardship.

Let us set the scene.

It is the First Christmas.

All the Heavenly Host demean themselves to adore Baby Jesus. A final chance to cement themselves déclassé.

God is fickle that way.

And why not?

Angels are eternally boring.

Void of temptation.

Excepting Morning Star.

Who was blinded by clarity.

Bless our Little Lost Angel, for whom virtue is constitutive.

As foretold, I have combed through the ashes of my life.

A singular life gone awfully astray.

And I have found my grain of salvation.

I can admit that I am humbled.

The mission failed.

The suffering was real.

The Angel does not change that.

She changes what I make of the creature who endured it.

You need a crown?

Here’s my fucking crown!

You need a harp?

Here. Take my goddamn harp!

You need wings?

Shit, take two.

They’re small.

My father was made for a better world than this.

Perhaps I am too.

Some choose virtue.

Others have virtue thrust upon them.