Echoes of Falling

Are we ever really still? Or are we always falling?

I’ve done a lot of thinking about falling. Literally, metaphorically, in your dreams, in your heart. And I’ve come to a conclusion: it is no different from being still. Because, honestly, we are never really still. Our chests lift with each breath. Our eyelids flutter, our fingers twitch, our skin crawls, our hearts pound. All the while, we are turning, rotating with the earth; careening through the universe in perpetual motion. Our movement never ceases, our thoughts never silence, and even when our breath stops, we are still spinning. And so, we are always still and we are always falling.

So when, at fourteen, I watched my father jump off the roof of a ten story building, I didn’t see him crash into the pavement beneath my feet. No, in that moment, I was five years old again, just watching him sleep; watching his eyes dart beneath his lids. His breathing coming and going, his body creaking against dreams. Still and falling, and never ending.

My eyes were fixed to that spot �" or what I thought might be the spot. The sidewalk had been bleached many times, removing all the evidence. So now I’ve been left with only guesses of where exactly he landed. It seems impossible to forget something like that �" where your father landed when he did a swan dive off your apartment building for you to see. But memories are fragile and they deteriorate easily. They shift and fade, and sometimes they only leave you with assumptions and questions.

It’d been six years since it all happened, and yet here I was, back to this place. I’d gotten to know these steps well, the ones leading to the apartment building diagonal to the one I used to live in. This spot on the third step, positioned with my back against the steps’ metal railing, angled to look to my left; I could see the sidewalk perfectly.

I heard the door behind me open, not at all unlike the way it frequently did on the days, several times a month, when I planted myself here for reasons I still could not begin to explain, not even to myself. Except, unlike all the other times when whoever was leaving walked right past me without a word, this time the footsteps stopped next to me. And for the first time in the year and a half since I stopped hovering in front of my old home and took a seat across from it, someone sat down beside me.

            “Yep, these steps are about as comfortable as I imagined. I’ve been a fool, all this time, just walking down them instead of taking a seat.” The voice beside me was male, lilting with a playful sarcasm. I didn’t want to look over at him, but I did. He was just a plain man, probably only a couple years older than I.

            “Yeah, excellent lumbar support, I know,” I mumbled after a moment, letting myself catch his gaze out of courtesy because it seemed like he was expecting me to reply. Of course he was expecting me to reply. He’d sat down next to me and spoken, which are some pretty basic efforts toward interaction. This seemed less natural to me now, as staring down memories alone had become personal ritual for me over the years.  He smirked a little.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, keeping eye contact with me.

I looked down at myself and saw what he saw: an unremarkable twenty year old girl, sitting out in windy, sixty five degree weather wearing only some ratty jeans, a beat up pair of black Converse with laces that were once white but now were a putrid shade of brown, and a thin, gray shirt with sleeves ending at my elbows. I took in his thick, dark pea coat. I was freezing.

 I fingered the frayed material at my knee and replied, “I’ve got thick skin.” He chuckled but I wasn’t sure why.

“I’ve seen you here before,” he told me.

“I’ve never seen you.”

He chuckled again. “I get the distinct feeling you don’t see anything other than whatever it is you’re always looking at over there.”

I mulled over what my next response should be and decided to tell the truth. Maybe he’d go away. “My father jumped off that building when I was fourteen.” I nodded across the street.

“Do you come here looking for him?” he asked without pause.

What sort of question was that? “He’s dead. There’s nothing to look for.”

“People have a way of staying with us, even after they leave.” He said it like he understood, and I shivered. I hated that I knew exactly what he meant. I bit my lip before saying more.

“I saw it happen. I was walking home from school.”

“It’s almost like he was waiting for you.”

“He wasn’t waiting for me!” I snapped, even though the thought had crossed my mind thousands of times. Sometimes, when I relived it in my dreams, I could even see him staring at me as he fell.

“You’re not him,” he said, without even flinching at my defensiveness. Who was this guy? Who came up to strangers and spouted out these sorts of assertions? My own voice floated back through my head with words I’d just shared with him. I guess we were pretty matched in social etiquette.

“You didn’t know him. And you don’t know me.” I said even though I don’t even know me. As if he had somehow plucked that last thought right out of my head he then asked, “Then do you come here looking for you?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

There was a pause longer than I thought he was capable at this point as he always seemed to have something ready to say.

“I have a mother-” he started.

“Everyone has a mother,” I cut him off.

“The way everyone has a father? The way you have a father?” he asked me. I looked away and clenched my jaw so hard I could feel it twitch a bit under the strain, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t even look back up at him.

“I have a mother,” he continued after a moment’s pause, letting the heavy air between us settle a bit. “And she likes to pretend she’s perfect. She wears curlers in her hair every night and bakes cookies and pies while wearing a frilly apron with these ugly bright pink flowers on it. She thinks that if she keeps her pills in the medicine cabinet, lined up and in order, it keeps her from being a junkie. It doesn’t matter to her that everything that goes into the oven burns, and she’s nearly burned down our house a couple times.

“My sister stopped giving two s***s a few years ago. She realized quicker than any of us how moribund her efforts were. I think it’s because everyone expected it to be her, the one to have the same cracks in her that my mother does, that no one ever paid attention to my brother. I got lucky. I was the youngest, I was the most shielded. And my sister was the oldest, she’d put up with everything the longest. My brother James, though, he was in the middle. Always in the middle. He used to stay up and watch her sleep, to make sure she was still breathing. Now he’s passed out with her. There’s only so much a person can take when they live with a ghost.”

“Your mom’s not a ghost,” I said.

“Isn’t she?” he questioned.

            “Look, it’s really sad about your mom and your brother, and everything, but I don’t understand why you’re telling me any of this.”

“That’s just the thing. Answers don’t always solve anything and I worry the most about the people who go through life always expecting that there will be closure for everything. We don’t get neat, little bows. Sometimes we’re given nothing. All we ever really have is ourselves, so when you fall down you’re never going be able to get up, not even if you have someone holding your hand, unless you really don’t want to fall anymore. Some people hit the ground and want to stay there.” I winced at the terms, but if he noticed, he didn’t say anything.

  “So you’re saying I should just stop giving a s**t?” I asked in a vilifying tone. It sounded harsh, harsher than I’d meant it to even though I’d chosen the words. The stranger shifted next to me, and I watched as he pushed himself up from the steps. I was sure I had irritated him but he looked down at me with what seemed like a sympathetic expression.

“I’m saying you’re alive. Maybe you should try acting like it.” Then he turned and walked away, going in the opposite direction of where I had been staring when he’d sat down next to me. He didn’t look back. No neat, little bows. Nothing.

I looked back at the sidewalk across the street again. I still couldn’t tell where it was my father had landed. He’d been gone from there for a long time; gone before he even hit the ground. I lifted myself up without using my hands as leverage, and walked down the last couple steps before turning on the sidewalk in the same direction he had gone minutes before. I didn’t want to go home yet.

Maybe I’d go buy a new coat. I was beginning to get tired of being so cold.

 

Author's Note

I recently entered this into a little contest at my school and am really hoping to place. It's the first short story I've ever really written. I'd really love to hear some comments.