Falling

As an exchange student in Tokyo, I joined the university judo team and spent my first week at the dojo flinging myself to the mat, learning how to fall without getting hurt.

The sound of a fall is important. A well-executed one sounds like a hundred-pound bag of sand hitting wet pavement: a single, heavy smack. That means that all important body parts have hit at once, absorbing the shock equally. But a fall that starts with a thud, immediately echoed by limbs hitting the floor, means someone is in pain.

After I’d gotten good at falling, I learned how to flip men twice my size. I couldn’t wait to get to the dojo each day, and I practiced until my arms and legs trembled with exhaustion.

I became involved with the team captain, who didn’t speak English. Our relationship was against team rules, so we kept it a secret. We ignored each other at practice, then rode the subway home together, purposely choosing crowded cars so we could press up against one another. One night I snuck into his room in the dormitory, and we lost our virginity to each other.

As the end of the school year approached, I prepared to return to the United States. The team captain and I had never discussed our future. Though I loved him, I knew I couldn’t stay in Japan. The day I left, I gave him a blue aerogramme already addressed to me and asked him to write.

A month later, the blue aerogramme arrived in my mailbox. I opened it with trembling hands. In carefully penned English, he had written, “Please forget me.”

I never have.

Laura K.
Brooklyn, New York

My sister careened backward, and her head smashed into the wall, leaving a softball-size dent. Shaking it off like a cartoon character, she insisted she had only a little headache, then drove off to her son’s soccer game.

Another day my sister fell in the shower, catching her wedding ring on the door handle and slicing her finger down to the bone. At the emergency room, when she changed into a hospital gown, her body was a patchwork of bruises: purple, green, yellow. The nurses suspected her husband, but the real villain is Parkinson’s disease.

At only fifty-three, my sister is being robbed of her balance and control. Now dementia is creeping in. A host of medications around the clock, in conjunction with a surgical brain implant, slow progression of the disease, but there is no cure.

Though she now uses a wheelchair, my sister vows to “beat this damn disease.” The minute we turn our backs, she gets up to go to the china cabinet or the stove. It’s as if the disease doesn’t exist in her mind. She just keeps getting up, and keeps falling.

Name Withheld

At the age of eleven I fell in love. My crush wasn’t on one of the neighborhood boys, though. I fell for Lauren, the new girl in my fifth-grade class. I wanted to walk her home from school, but instead she took me to a stairwell where only the janitor was supposed to go. There, Lauren taught me to kiss, Beach Blanket Bingo style: leaning forward with our hands behind our backs and our lips puckered. It was both thrilling and terrifying. What if someone saw us? What if it got around school? Two girls kissing!

Lauren told me not to worry: if anyone saw us, we’d say we were practicing for the real thing. “It’s not like we’re queer,” she whispered.

When I heard that, I felt as if I were plummeting into a deep hole. I gazed at Lauren’s lips and realized that falling in love with another girl was something I’d have to keep secret — especially from her.

Merry Song
Eugene, Oregon

I used to define myself by my speed, efficiency, and competence. Then, four years ago, I was diagnosed with lupus, a progressive autoimmune disease. It is like a slow fall. Eventually it will crush my body. For now, though, my symptoms are limited to periodic flare-ups during which my shoulders and knees burn like a bad sunburn, my mouth and nose sprout sores, my chest hurts, and I feel exhausted.

Sometimes I can’t sleep because of the pain. One night I sat up watching CNN and saw falls galore — politicians, marriages, CEOs, buildings, and even countries. It was as if the world itself had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. I found this strangely reassuring. I was connected with others by this invisible cord of illness, by this falling.

Could I have been wrong about illness all these years? Could it be a bridge between us all, a comfort in a lonely world? Perhaps suffering, once it becomes inevitable, should be accepted and embraced.

I wish someone had told me this twenty-five years ago when I received my diploma from medical school.

Name Withheld

The sight of the sun, after months of darkness, signaled the end of the long arctic winter and made me want to sing, dance, and begin spring-cleaning. I boxed up the books that my neighbors had given me — to help me endure my first winter in Kotzebue, Alaska — and set out to carry them to the clinic. Rather than tote the heavy box around the frozen lagoon, I decided to take a shortcut across its icy surface.

Inuit children played in the snow nearby. When they waved to me, I made comic faces and grunting sounds like a gorilla. The kids laughed and cheered. Then I pretended to walk a tightrope, carefully sliding one boot in front of the other, balancing the box of books. The children smiled, waiting for my next trick. I hoisted the box atop my head, balancing it with both hands, the way an African woman carries a basket.

Suddenly I felt a rumbling. There was a loud snap that reminded me of ice cubes cracking in a glass, and my footing gave way. Books skidded everywhere like hockey pucks as my body plunged into the frigid lagoon.

Freezing water rapidly soaked my heavy clothing. Barely able to move my arms, I sank, terror-stricken. Yet when my feet hit bottom, I became curious and opened my eyes to see what was down there — no debris, sea grass, or fish, as in California’s warm lagoons. The glacial water stung my eyeballs, and my arms were frozen in place. Then I blacked out.

I awoke bundled in blankets in a small, sparsely furnished room. An old man rubbed my feet, and an Inuit woman toweled my hair fiercely while others rubbed my back and massaged and shook my arms and fingers. I didn’t recognize any faces.

“How’d I get here?” I asked.

They didn’t answer, but talked among themselves in their native dialect. Shocked, embarrassed, and grateful, I whispered, “Thank you.”

The elderly Inuit man cupped my bare feet in his hands and pressed their icy soles to his naked chest. Through skin and bones I felt his heart beating, its life-giving warmth.

Shinan Barclay
Coos Bay, Oregon

I was barely getting by writing freelance articles, shelving books in the town library, and selling vegetables from my garden. I didn’t have enough money for health insurance or new clothes. When friends asked me out for lunch, I would check the change slots at the local carwash before confirming.

Then my car developed mysterious problems that ended up costing me all I had saved, plus months of future income. And it still didn’t run reliably. At the library, my athletic shoes didn’t conform to the new employee dress code, so I was fired. My car broke down again. Without it, I couldn’t pick up groceries at the food pantry. When I asked a friend if she was driving in that direction, she told me, in an exasperated tone, that I really should get AAA.

The middle-class people I used to work with have no understanding of my struggles. I have more in common with the homeless, who don’t have the luxury of judging others by such superficial standards.

Su Clauson
Blacksburg, Virginia

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