Failing to Fall

This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.

'Come now.'

'What?'

'I need you. I need you to come right now.'

'I'm working.'

'And I'm not. I'm at home. Come on.'

'You don't–'

'I do. Tell them you're feeling ill. You've got to be somewhere. There's an emergency. This is an emergency.'

'I can't.'

'Will you come now. I want you to. I want you.'

'I can't.'

'I want you.'

'Really, it's impossible.'

But it happens: I walk through the crashing or silent corridors and clean out of the building without even noticing whether I've put on my coat. I'm already on the way to somewhere else.

It seems a kind of falling, and anyone can fall. I wonder if we don't all wait from time to time, ready to make a dive, to find that space where we can drop unhindered. Like an internal suicide.

So I start my fall and the door into the outside air swings snug behind me and I'm somewhere I can't go at other times. Here we all walk together; are together. Watch for our feet, see our bodies; we all of us have the same music romping inside our heads. We're moving through a big, blue waltz without a collision or a slip and I have my very own personal direction, smooth ahead of me: build a wall and I will simply walk it down. Today I can do that. Look for my heart and you'll see it beating, even through my coat.

This is the only time I have when to be nothing other than me is quite enough. I love this.

It may have been raining for weeks, there may be salted snow and litter greasing together under my feet, dog shit and vomit–the usual pavements we have to use–but today I will neither notice, nor be touched. Angels have decreed it; I will be clean today. The air will shine. And if I glance to the side, the effect is disconcerting. Things are blurred, as though I were watching them from a moving car. Once I have my direction, I can get up a fair head of speed. The final corner spirals off to my right, the sun is blazing a banner in every window and there they are, the reason I came: the taxis.

I can't be sure why the taxis are always involved. I only know I have always taken taxis when I've been falling. When I could afford them and when I could not and when I had to borrow money before I climbed in. It was almost as if they had some claim on me. Sometimes I would find myself clipping that phone call short, just to get moving, to get aboard.

'Come now.'

'Yes, I'll get a taxi, I'm on my way.'

That kind of thing.

¹