JANUARY FICTION

Falling

By

Quirina Roode-Gutzmer

Sometimes when I fall I see a Kafkaesque landscape, or thoughts will be draped like Dali clocks in unforeseen places or I’ll just get an impressionistic glimpse of feeling-splotches. Sometimes I am plunged into nightmare and in the nick of time my parachute will open and pull me right out of it. My legs will shudder from the recoil. Sometimes, lightning will go through my brain from one ear to the other, which makes me take a deep breath and I always wonder if, for a while, I had forgotten to breathe.

Falling like a leaf sent into twirling by heaven’s breath, or as a snowflake whirling, I imagine, would be a most gentle kind of falling. Falling from outer space, from the edge of vacuum, free falling, and meeting the air rushing up, tumbling into the speed of sound, muscles aching, parachute opening, and gliding into landing would then be the champagne of all falling.

I want to fall into Morpheus, fall—in love with him. But I am afraid. What if this love is not requited? What if he rejects me and leaves me in a state of insomnia? What if I fall, and not land properly, crash, leaving me possibly unable to ever fly again, or to fall again?

Sometimes I forget what he looks like and can’t even recall his name when I am stricken with grief or when I am in the deepest of despair, then when I need him most to give me relief, or reprieve.

I imagine that the finest departure from the mortal coil is to fall into the wide-open arms of Morpheus and to be luxuriously bound in his embrace with an infinite kind of love, the gravity arms never opening again, and to fall and fall into a forever oblivion.