Falls

by Benjamin Grossman

occur even if we throw up Adam and Eve, cut down every single apple tree, and rid the world of autumn, because the act of moving downward both dresses and undresses us, forces us to close our eyes until we become foggy breaths exchanging air or sluggish forms sinking below the surface of love. We dread the idea of never falling again and hope that if we fall in love we never stop falling. But how many relationships have ended from landings, from that unfortunate denial of descending? We gaze at heights as if fear lay naked before our eyes, not understanding that the phobia was always about the fall. As children we may dream of wings in place of arms, or play in what drops out of the sky. As adults we may obsess over an infinitesimal chance of crashing into pieces, curse at all the precipitation we used to dance in. Age has a way of turning us from falling so that we only associate a fall with accidents and death. We’re taught nothing is worse than the Fall, and yet we’ve already fallen past that fall: from heaven to earth to hell we’ve tumbled, incapable of remembering where we ever first fell from. But what about falling stars and how we wished on them as if we forgot falling isn’t good? And didn’t we spin in circles and sing nursery rhymes until we all fell down? We watch our children fall, let them fall so they can learn to walk alone, and we lust after that high where we separate from ourselves, actually fall outside of ourselves—that lone moment when we wish we were in a perpetual state of falling. No matter what Physics knows not all things fall at the same rate just like not all things survive their falls: parachutes don’t always open; smiles don’t always overpower gravity; bombs don’t unfall. Though for every downfall there is a windfall; for every pitfall there is fallout; for every faller there is a fallback. Humans leaven from egg and sperm just as much as they leaven from falling.