Free Fall
She was in a coma, the doctor told meover the phone, she was electrolytes out of whack,that was the literal, while I was on another continent,standing on a cliff, looking down at the sublimeview mywas literal too, the glittering sea, and the harborwith tiny boats lined up like teeth. Below uscypresses jutted from the cliff’s red rock.I couldn’t understand how a person,a consciousness, was a kind of invention,provisional, and could be erased by glucoseand potassium spilling through cell walls.That was what I was thinking as we stoodin the small crowd that had gatheredto watch the sunset. I marveled at the lossin store. Though I saw the beauty. A skystained every color but green. A slow,liminal glower stretching flat and thinas settling smoke, a horizon and a unit of time.Let us go then, you and I, while she,I shuddered, was a patient etherized upon a table.Then I shuddered again as the manstanding next to us jumpedand fell and kept falling. Terror bloomed,then his parachute. Then the literal and figurativereordered themselves, then what we’d reached forinstinctively in the moment of falling…Then wordlessly we let go of each other’s hand.
