Falling is Like This.

"It feels like reckless driving when we're talking. It's fun while it lasts, and it's faster than walking. But no one's gonna sympathize when we crash..."

The problem with throwing yourself headfirst into everything (literally and figuratively) is that you never know where you’ll land. Sometimes you’ll fall. Sometimes you will hurt/break/bleed. But in those ephemeral moments before the crash, you’re as close to flying as you’ll ever be. I want to land solidly with both feet in this new reality. I want to open my veins to this city, let it seep into my bloodstream. I want to swallow it whole, feel it pulsing and alive under my skin. Glowing hot and heavy inside my ribcage. Because the alternative means existing neither here nor there. Because I can’t walk forward, looking backward, without tripping over my own clumsy ambitions.

“Well, one of these days is gonna be right soon, you’ll find your legs and go and stay gone.”

I keep expecting to wake up and be immersed in somewhere truly other. Instead I repeatedly encounter the realization that this is a new place, but still a place. I still have to eat and sleep and pay my bills on time. I still have to drag myself out of bed when the big heavies come crashing in. The big heavies still come crashing in. I’ll fall onto my bed, clothed in the sunlight that bleeds through my dirty window, feeling lost, my body curved like an open-ended parenthesis around nothing.

“Sometimes you are winter sunlight,

chasing away the shadows but leaving me

so damn cold”

The best cure I’ve found for the big heavies is walking. Hauling myself out of bed and forcing myself out into the rain/wind/sleet. Feeling the world in this most primitive sense, trying to become part of the texture that keeps rubbing me raw. Because eventually the rain stops. The sun splits the clouds, illuminates all the suspended drops caught in bare, wintertree branches. It lights them up like Christmas morning. Sometimes I wish I were a camera, because my eyes can perceive beauty but my words are incapable of fully embodying it. I can’t explain to you how green everything is here, how the moss grows like a thick, soft carpet, or like a blanket inviting you to stop and rest awhile. How it spills down the steps to my front door like a welcome mat.  I can’t capture the exact shades and tones of sunset when I feel purple heavy in my dreams. I can’t, with any aptitude, explain why a stone garden wall stopped me in my path. It took my breath away.

“And language just happened it was never planned, and it’s inadequate to describe where I am in the room of my house, where the lights never bend. Waiting for this day to end…”