About two years ago I lost the ability to fly. Not like Superman, nothing so impressive. Just a loose kind of upright hovering, as though my heart were suspended from a cloud passing high overhead. The onsets came unannounced: Electricity warmed my spine and I simply inhaled, drifting upward, dangling until I could push off a nearby wall or streetlight.
It unnerved passersby. Spontaneously flying people were unsafe or at least untrustworthy.
It happens a lot in movie theaters. At Wenders’ “Far Away, So Close!” I spent half the film with my ankles hooked under the seat in front of me. This annoyed some of the patrons and they told me so. But others approached me afterwards and said the movie made them feel something … different. Maybe they felt a touch of what I felt; they were just more grounded.
I was happy and strange and quietly puzzled.
For a time.
I met her at a park on one of those rare spring days when I least expect the most ordinary things. Her white wisp of a dog bravely challenged all comers while she sat nearby, transported away by The Little Prince. I don’t recall our first words, but at one point she asked, “Are you safe?” and I replied, “Probably not.”
She smiled, “Do you know you’re standing a few inches off the ground?”
“It happens sometimes,” I said.
We saw each other almost every day after that. We both loved movies, although sometimes I cried at the things she laughed at. And vis versa. She had an impressive collection of sunglasses to “see things in different lights.” She had a collection of moods like the weather systems of a tropical island.
Sometimes, when we made love, I’d end up pressed against the bedroom ceiling with the covers draping down around her like a tent. She said she was happy I could fly, but sometimes … sometimes her eyes shifted or she would tug on my dangling legs a little too hard.
One day she wasn’t there when I came back down. She spelled out her goodbye with refrigerator poetry: “we don’t like the same gum drop s any more.”
My heart immediately crushed my body to the ground. How could I have ignored the impossible mass of my own feet all these years? I slogged through days, weeks, and months as an athlete weight training on the deepest ocean floor. I forgot what the air was like up there. Sunlight faded by seaweed and murk became good enough for me. People included me in more conversations about football now that I wasn’t so different.
All movies became the same movie.
Last week I began receiving small boxes full of gumdrops, each containing a different flavor. I found at the bottom of each box a single word of refrigerator poetry. They eventually spelled out: “forgive me meet in aus tin ?”
So I’m leaving for Austin, following a trail of gumdrops.
Did I mention she loves movies?