Last Year's Fall
by Charissa Pereira
Last Year’s Fall
I was ready last year. I was a butterfly, dancing with full-grown wings, waiting to soar.
And I’d put on my blush pink dress, and I’d brushed my hair into soft waves that framed my face like the picture that would eventually be in our home, on a wall, maybe above the fireplace or in the foyer.
I was on the top floor of a skyscraper, and my hands were held up high in worship. My eyes were closed as the drum of the band cascaded into throne room pulses around all of us.
The vision behind my eyes was richer than the one when they were open. Angels danced and the elders bowed low.
Our voices sang on their own. The Spirit was worshipping and our lips were merely hosting it.
I was ready.
And I leaned against the glass, just for a minute—to catch my breath, trying to find you in the room.
But the glass gave way as the window burst open, a faulty hinge ricocheting off the side as I fell forward and over the holy edge of all that had been supporting me.
It hadn’t been able to bear my weight.
Where were my wings? My pink dress thrashed wildly about my twisting body as gravity pulled it’s lace like a black hole does a dying planet on its horizon.
The gasp of the others wrapped itself like a snake around my throat as I continued to fall.
Floor twenty-seven whooshed by me as my fitful hands tried to grasp for a lifeline, a second chance, a prayer, anything.
Floor sixteen screamed to the wind as I heard a soft voice start to rise from inside my chest.
The boundary lines for me have fallen in pleasant places.
Floor eight rushed by as I squeezed my crying eyes closed to brace myself for whatever this death might feel like.
Surely, I have a delightful inheritance.
And then a searing pain as a chord snapped from my heart up to you still on the thirty-seventh floor.
Sirens and a crowd pulled into focus, and they were all staring at me.
The pink of my dress had gone, and the remnants of my wings were scattered all around the street.
And I blinked and realized that I’d begun again.
And they were all watching as I wriggled from the hole in the ground and crawled past the ambulance, waving one of my many arms to let them know that they could leave.
And I looked up, and there you were at the highest point of the building.
You hadn’t come down like the others, to see if I had made it.
You had abandoned me to the realm of the dead.
— Charissa