Jennifer Reek
Falling
I have a recurring dream where I’m falling through the sky. I’m in a car, flying off a bridge, through the air, into black water. I have this dream so often I am convinced this will be the way I die. Usually a man is driving. But the other night I dreamt I was in the driver’s seat. I bet you if I were in therapy now, my therapist would call that progress. My feminist friends would too. I always wake up before I drown. Sometimes before the car even hits the water. They say you never die in your dreams, that if you do, that means you are dead. I’ve never died in my dreams. So I must still be alive.
***
Falling in love. I’ve fallen. Several times. Sometimes hard. How do you stop falling if you’ve already started? Grab a ledge? A branch? An outstretched hand? No hands reach for me. I think you just fall. There is nothing to be done. The Romantics had no trouble with this. Fall into an abyss, they would say, into love, into death. Sometimes I think falling of this kind is most like this: I come from a family of fish. We spent a lot of time in the ocean. My mother would take my little brother and me out past the breakers, out where our feet could no longer touch bottom. We would get in a circle and hold hands and swim clockwise and sing: ‘Ring around the rosy! A pocketful of posies! Ashes, ashes! We all fall down!’ On ‘we all fall down,’ we would drop under water, still holding hands, still looking at each other. Yes, falling in love is like that more than anything: footing unsure, circling each other, risking drowning, seeing unclearly, holding hands and not letting go.
***
Why can’t we keep ourselves from falling? My father died from a fall. He’d fallen, and he couldn’t get up. I can’t watch that stupid commercial without weeping now. I turn it off the second it comes on, and it comes on often in Florida, the land of the almost dead. It should have a goddamn trigger warning. Dying that way seems impossibly silly and tragic. Nurses tell me that it’s not unusual. It is miraculous that we are not constantly pulled to the earth, like rag dolls, always falling down, crumpling into a heap. Or like mannequins made of iron filaments pulled to earth’s magnetic core, up briefly, then down, up for a moment, then down we go. Inside, this is who I am, falling down, getting up, falling down. Sometimes that’s me on the outside too. On my eighth birthday, we went into New York to see the circus. Afterward, Johnny R. raced me down the Fifth Avenue sidewalk. The earth pulled me down, both knobby knees slammed into the sidewalk. In the hospital emergency room, the doctor removed the grit, the nurses sang Happy Birthday. There would be scars. My mother would say: “No one will ever want you with those scarry knees.” She was wrong. The legs turned out so fabulous, the scars didn’t matter. Plus, some men like scars, visible or invisible. I stayed upright for years after except for some fainting spells and blackouts from booze and drugs as a teenager. Then I began falling at ‘the change,’ and it was a huge hateful change, at least for me. My body was alien, no longer linked to the moon. I despised it. And because of that, the body made me fall. Going down a spiral staircase, it pulled me off the step, twisted my leg around, breaking my foot, slamming my head against the wall. It pulled me into traffic, put my hand in front of a speeding cab. It tripped me up on a smooth sidewalk, tying my hands with scarf and iPod cords so I could not break the fall, smashing my nose, my teeth, ruining my Burberry raincoat, the only possession I had left that I loved. It pulled up my feet in a slippery marble bathroom, knocking the wind out of me, smashing my head against the floor. It pulled my foot down as I went to step over a Madison Avenue curb, but this time I was ready to defend myself and threw out my arms in time. Now I am ready. I fight back. This strange body will not defeat me. I will not fall. At least not on the outside.