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Show Over The Falls If only a past could be recovered by the postal service; if only the lost could be restored with a stamp. I am four, I am five, I am eight. I think the world is kept spinning through the sheer force of my will. My body bends forward at the waist when I walk, determined that I am to be first, to be fast, to be strong. Before I hit puberty, I have the gait of an old woman, worn from the effort of always being right. In this world, mistakes are not acceptable. I am falling and I never land. Or I never remember landing, though I must. One minute I am standing on the back of the couch, still living in Virginia, the lava not yet returned, the near-drowning only a month behind us, wrestling with Scott while the babysitter watches Dynasty on television, and the next, I am sitting on the wicker table, as the babysitter and her mother, a thick woman smelling of oregano, ice my head and insist that I am okay. Upon regaining consciousness, I can only think that I should not be on the table. That I never land breaks the narrative of my life neatly in two, leaving a crevasse. Part one stretches from birth to the moment when, with one good push, I lose my balance and enter the air. The second begins on the wicker table, head swelling, fallen. What is unsettling is not so much the halving as the gap-this moment when I stopped being while the rest of the world continued. The babysitter lies to my parents, or more literally, fails to mention the part where I lie unconscious-for seconds, minutes, forever-on the carpet-covered concrete slab of the basement floor, thereby dismantling the only possible bridge between the eight year 74 |