James Friedman
When I saw you falling, I didn’t move.
I didn’t swoop to catch you.
I saw myself in you, but that didn’t help.
I never was good with mirrors.
I didn’t know what was at the bottom, what you would hit, but I thought maybe you would learn to float, or to fly away. But every time I talked to you, it seemed that you froze in place. I thought you had stopped falling. Some days passed where all I did was lay in bed and hold on to you, and you’d pull on me, and then I’d carry us away, and we’d never hit the ground. I thought I saved you.
But the Earth got closer to us.
Day by day the world got uglier. Dinners were torture, outings were laborious. Classes filled with fire and sleeping alone brewed bad dreams. You longed for me in that bedroom of yours, where we looked out the window to see the first snowfall before falling into the warmth of each other in bed. Nothing felt right like our hands in tow and a lounge on the futon in my dorm. We spent many days in the room. All the while you ran around in your mind and in your heart, and you would text me worried about the future, and I’d ask you what you were afraid of that couldn’t be run from. We were in this together. I had come to take you home. We would stand on the wing of a plane and with your arms around me we would glide on a golden wave through tears in the clouds, never to land. You’d talk about breaking, and I’d beg you to hold on to me.
Grab me tight, I said, save us.
We shattered entirely upon hitting the ground, but it was a slow break. The facsimile of my soul slow cooked on paper even after we left this world together, reflected in the words a mirror cracked by time and decayed. We looked too long and forgot who we were.
But all that falls and flies must meet dirt when it’s done
Spread your wings my dear
Even Icarus saw the sun