I do believe in angels, but some of them have hearts of stone. You don’t get to watch humanity for any appreciable amount of time and not start to put some conditions in place for your compassion. Empathy is beautiful, but being taken for a ride and being made to be a sucker by those that see your kindness as weakness is hardly a virtue. The world is full of suffering as it is – there really is no objective need to fake it. But people do. They will manufacture drama out of thin air – always casting themselves as the aggrieved and reasonable party. Their sense of identity resides in their tales of perpetual victimhood. This is why – yes – I believe there are angels. But they have cried so much their eyes have run dry – and there is no more left, even for those who truly suffer. And their wings have been frozen in place – because they flew in to save the hyperbolic one too many times. And their hearts have dwindled and died and were interned in stone – because often – not always but often – to feel in this world is to be everyone’s bitch.