Freefall

The other day I made it down to the beach. It was, in all ways, breathtaking. Even as I lay gasping on the shore with salt clogging in my throat, the water lapped a gentle blue green below me and birds dipped and twirled like ballerinas, free.

I could feel my world narrowing to those birds, as the shushing voice of the ocean faded and the wind calmed, no longer howling to push me back, back to where it was safe and empty and dull.

No, all I could see was the falling dance of the seabirds, all I could hear, their congenial chatter, and my fingers spread, feeling not the gritty sand beneath my body, but that calmed wind holding me, guiding me on a breeze.

I thought then that dying was worth it for this perfect moment - was more than worth it. My life up to this point was not enough in exchange for this one flight. To die, and to die in that powerful aura that is the ocean, was a bargain, even a steal.

My heart slowed itself, whether in response to my decision or my slow suffocation, I couldn't know, but it didn't matter. How could I go back to my life on the ground, in the House, without the seabirds' freedom?

The answer was simple. A great deal more practical than a change of heart on the precipice, too. My mother would find me.

She took my unconscious body, arms outstretched toward the sea, and dragged me from the water, the seabirds. She pulled me back through the hot and gritty sand, the little garden with the useless, tiny fences, and into the House. Or, at least she told me she did when I woke up.

She cried over me, then, in the little white room that faced away from the ocean, and her voice did not remind me of seabirds as it had when I was young. She railed and coughed her remonstrations like a crow; her endless well of lamentation drowned the room in salt-heavy black feathers. And they were dull, because she was flightless, but they choked me as surely as the unfiltered air outside had before she took me back.

She always took me back.

When I was young, I'd had asthma. And it hadn't bothered me the way it does some children. I did not mind the inhaler, or the concerned gym teachers, or the way the other boys ran faster and harder so I could never catch them. The asthma was just a weight about my ankle, not a chain, and I was still free.

I wonder sometimes, if I knew, with that unthinking certainty children have, that it would not always be that way? But, no. I couldn't have when my honorable mother, the acclaimed doctors, the professional whackjobs, and all the other experts in me, had not.

They still have no idea. My curse goes unnamed and unspoken. It came on suddenly one morning when my mother still sounded like seabirds. I would usually wake to that voice, calling my name like a two note song.

"Terry!" She would whistle, cheerful as open windows on a spring day blooming. "Terry!"

Yet, something else woke me that morning. Something that was wrong and my legs knew it. They pushed me out of bed and threw me down the stairs, painfully, painfully, but I was grateful for the pain and the noise it made because I could not breathe to scream. My mother startled violently in the kitchen and said something that was lost in the panic of her tone.

Children tend to think their parents can fix anything, if they only have it brought to their attention, but my clever legs couldn't make up for the rest of me long enough to get me to Mother. They, too, had been betrayed by my failing lungs, by the very air that wisped fruitlessly, toxically in and out of my body.

I had sprawled over the tile that guarded the stairway, dying, and knew, knew, knew. This was different; this was crueler than any asthma attack had been; this was death.

She found me then, too, but I did not hear her voice. I did not need to hear her voice to realize that she knew, too. I did not need to feel her pull me up to understand we would head for the car and the hospital. Her prayers grew in intensity and volume as she drove, though they did not reach me. One of the doctors told me later how she had skidded into the parking lot and kicked open the door with the Lord's prayer a scream on her lips - my body limp in her arms.

I did not hear.

To this day, though I claw the scratched and vague remnants of my memory, I recall no appeal to God. No divine supplication. All that was allowed through my darkness was a lonesome crow, a lonesome crow cackling static over the cry of a seabird's dying breath.