Failing to Fall

Standing there with the taxis, I pause for a wonderful moment–I enjoy that–and then I reach my hand out for the door. Inside, in the air-freshener and cigarette and boot-sole smelling cab, things change. Moving away, the fear begins.

With my face beside the window, I become acutely visible. I fill out with the feeling of being on my way and keep growing. I turn into something cinematically huge. Surely, someone I work with, someone I know, someone representative of God's wrath will take away this much pleasure before it arrives. Because this is too big for only me to have; I should be at work, I should be doing some intermediate something for someone I do not know. I shouldn't be growing this noticeably.

I am afraid of eyes that will see me this way and then not understand. I myself have no understanding, because I am falling. There are meadows and opening seas of room between working and paying and shopping and cooking and eating and sleeping and general household maintenance in which I can be me, doing what I want. I no longer have to look out of the window and wonder who has my life, and if I miss it.

Seated in the expectancy of the taxi, I can love all the halts, the lights, the flaring pigeons. My journey will take forever and no time at all. When I pay the driver I will only faintly notice how much, because money is irrelevant. It lies in my hand, defeated–just for today, we've changed places and I can pass it across with a big, careless smile before the door barks shut behind me.

There is an irregular instant when I leave the cab, a slight loss of rhythm which is no more than natural, before I push the steps away beneath me and make the slow walk to the lift. Almost there. I plummet up the storeys in a stale little scrawled-over can with a pulse in my stomach. There is the flutter of arrival, of the door sliding back, the final steps, another door. Then I feel the pressure of movement between my face and another; the touch of hands, of air, of breath within breath.

And the fall is over. I know what will happen now.