Falling Up
They have filled books with what it feels like to fall in love. Sonnets and short stories fill the pages between the front cover and the back one, books stack themselves upon the shelves of this library and that one: decades and centuries and entire literary movements built upon describing a single feeling.
There is a literal gravity to it: falling, as though it were something that you cannot possibly resist, something that is weighing you down, damnit it’s fucking physics that pulled us both together kind of falling.
She says, I am falling for you.
I’m falling in love with you.
I fell for you.
As though you were a puddle she tumbled into: uncontrollably, against her own will, didn’t i say that thing about physics already, were you even listening?
Everyone wants to talk about that feeling of falling. The one where you take someone’s hand and leap off of the edge of the cliff. Or sometimes, you aren’t taking their hand but, instead, you’re following behind them, all too aware that hello, hi, yes let’s not shit ourselves here, this is a cliff we’re both jumping off of, but okay, i’ll jump, i’m right behind you darlin’.
Other times, you’re leaping behind them, chasing after them, and apparently, they want to run away — so far away, in fact, that they’ll lead you off the literal goddamn edge. And you won’t even know what hit you until, of course, you hit the solid rock that’s lining the bottom of the gorge that you didn’t even bother to look for when you jumped in the first place.
So what I’m trying to say here is why is no one talking about the opposite of the falling down, the falling in, the falling head over heels?
Why won’t anyone tell me about the falling up — the falling out of love?
She has only fallen out of love twice, but two times is enough to know that falling out of love tastes a little bit like buttercream: soft and delicate, the folds of little floral, frosted buds like open arms reaching out for you, waiting for you to bury your heavy head into them, but somehow leaving you unsatisfied upon the very last bite.
Falling out of love is just like floating in water. It seems inconceivable, how do we not sink to the bottom of the sea, unbelievable. Yachts and barges and broken hearts alike: they can all stay afloat upon the saltiest of swells.
But most things that float start at the top and then make their way down, sinking until they are eventually covered in something ancient, or perhaps something resembling algae.
Falling up is different.
Your emergence happens last, the way that a bubble meanders its way towards the surface and lingers just long enough for its very presence to fill you up until it is —
The first time she fell out of love, it happened over many moments, which stretched on like an eternity. He had been with her all the time and she was surrounded by him entirely: a little fish enveloped completely by the lake that it lives in, unable to escape, and yet incapable of surviving outside of its liquid cage were it ever able to.
She didn’t even know it was happening when it finally did. She didn’t notice as the atoms, molecules, particles around her suddenly changed their essence, their structure, the very chemical makeup of what had made her love him in the first place. But I suppose, when something occurs electron by electron, it’s hard to know that anything is even happening.
And so, he began to leave her. Drop by drop, until she was no longer consumed by the memory of him.
And she began to rise to the surface until: she was floating lightly on a watery bed that was so light, so weightless, it was hard for her to believe that she had been at the bottom of it to begin with.
The falling up does not happen when you want it to happen.
It cannot be willed and refuses to occur on demand. Not when you call out for it, nor when you plead for it, or when you beg it to come for you, not even when you’re collapsed there in a little ball on your kitchen floor in tears because you put your music on shuffle and then “Fire and Rain” starts playing and oh how you wish you could go back to before this song made you feel like this and suddenly he is right there beside you except, wait a minute, he’s not there at all.
Instead, here’s how it will arrive: in June, when his name pops up on your Twitter feed early in the morning or late at night, and it is then that you remember that he even happened: that he came, he took, he verbed a noun of significance from you and yet, somehow, you let it go. Without realizing it, without knowing it was happening, you released it out, and began to fall upwards, in the way that even goddamn gravity couldn’t pull you down.
The last time that she fell out of love, it happened in a single moment. In that way, it was different than the first time.
She had been down below the turquoise and the aqua, below the cerulean and the navy. Where she had been, it was darker than night — there’s no room for starlight at the bottom of the ocean.
This time, she had been waiting for it to happen, waiting for the little specks that she couldn’t see but could feel all around her to start to turn different colors, to start to lift her up so that she could float up, up, up.
She crossed her legs at the bottom of the sea, until she began to be covered in green, slimy self-disgust, her imagination of what it must have looked like even worse than not being able to see it on herself at all.
And then one day, when she was closing her eyes, standing on the subway platform on a hot day in May, she felt it: the release. A rock, a shipwreck, an unforgiving heart — whatever it was, it finally gave way, thrusting her up through the blackness into hues of blue, until she had to close her eyes because it was far brighter than she was used to.
Her head finally surfaced and she could feel the sunlight through her tightly-shut eyelids. And the first thing that she did? Gasp for air.
