In love and falling

Just…one…more…step…

Oh wow, it’s true! I’d heard about this, but I didn’t think it was a real thing! I can’t be more than three years old here, I haven’t thought about this in years. My older brother has something, I don’t know what it is, but I want it, he makes me want it, and I want it so badly that my breath begins to catch in my throat and I can feel my eyes beginning to sting but before I can cry he holds out his hands in a conciliatory manner and says he’ll let me have the thing if I give him my share of the sweets mum bought us and I instantly agree and as he takes the sweets and runs off laughing, stuffing them into his mouth, he drops something on the floor, I can see that all he had, the thing that I had wanted so desperately, was one of my own crayons and then the tears do come, loudly and freely.

I thought this would be fast, but it’s like I’m in two separate streams of time. In one, I can feel the wind whipping against my face as the building storms upwards like a rocket off a launchpad, in the other, I’m back in primary school, receiving a prize for the best topic work at assembly. I’d made a model of a Victorian mine out of two shoeboxes glued together, complete with little child figures pushing carts of coal. My dad had helped me with the glueing and the fiddly bits. That was a few months before he died. I see the headmaster, Mr Prendergast, motioning me to stand and come to the front with my model, and clapping his hands to start the school in a round of applause. I get up, on fire with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, carrying my precious model. I sneak a look at Katie Fletcher, and to my joy, see that she is clapping with all the rest. While I’m looking at her, I don’t see Tony Blake snaking a foot out in front of me, and the next moment I am hurtling forwards, the model in the air, tiny figures spilling out of it in all directions. Before I finish falling, in a world of pain and shame, amidst gales of laughter from my schoolmates, I see the minecart my dad made break into pieces against the herringbone pattern of the parquet floor.

I’m older now, adolescent, permanently either angry or embarrassed. But here…I’m happy! I’m walking her home after school. The sun is shining like it often does in your happiest memories, and because I’m walking along hand in hand with my first love, I feel like everyone else in the world is just an extra in the movie in which we are the stars. I feel my chest swell up with pride and keep stealing glances at this beautiful girl who unbelievably seems to feel the same way about me as I feel about her. There is a tinge of sadness, though, because at the end of the road we’re walking along is the park that her house is next to, and our walk is nearly over, and it will be hours until I see her again: a lifetime! When we get to the park, she tells me she doesn’t have to go in yet if I can stay a while? I feel a surge of joy and we sit together on a bench across a swathe of green from her house, in the shade of a beautiful tree. We kiss, and afterwards, I can taste her lip balm on my own lips. Knowing what I want to do but uncertain as to how to proceed, I haltingly ask her permission to touch her breast, and she smiles and says yes. We kiss again, and I am in a thrill of ecstasy as my hand starts at her waist and travels slowly up across her abdomen until it reaches the full roundness of her right breast. I can feel its softness, its pliability beneath the slightly harder shell of her bra and school shirt, and as my fingers gently explore its contours I am in wonder at the world of possibilities that suddenly lies before me.

Older still in this one, married and not to her, now I’m a man of the world, and broken by it. A screaming row, interrupted only to lie to the two watching children that mummy and daddy are ok.

Still I rush onwards, and downwards. Shorter memories, longer ones, the important and the seismic and the trivial and the mundane and the long forgotten. The first time I saw my family home after moving out. Graduation day. A walk on a windy day, larking around with friends. Eating fast food at a motorway services. The ball dying in a muddy puddle right in my path 25 yards from goal and flying in a perfect arc from my boot to the top right corner in a spray of water and mud. My mother, dying in a nursing home bed, the tears running down my face as I failed to find the right words to say, my brother’s wedding day and the marquee collapsing on 150 screaming, laughing guests. A bonfire, fireworks and a selection of Christmases, all of them similar, none of them White.

Where am I now? Oh, I know this one. This is the one. This is why I’m here, now, falling. Why do I have to go through this again? I’m with her, the girl from the park bench, but years later. Old friends, former lovers, meeting again, another sunny day in a different time, different place, different world. Furtive glances, unease, but something indefinable, an old bond, never completely severed, reawakened and growing, growing, growing. Kind words, kinder words, caresses, and the love blooms in a beautiful soft explosion, and envelopes us once again.

But now it isn’t easy and free. It feels like it in this moment, by a gently babbling river, but back in our respective homes with our respective partners it brings pain. This pain grows until it is more than she can bear, and her pain is more than I can bear. A choice, a winner, a loser. And then separate pains, our own individual agonies.

A slew of sleeting bad memories now, drunkenness, arguments and despair. Tears, loneliness and rejected interventions, rushing closer to the present like the ground rushing to meet a falling body. Ascending the stairs, opening the fire door, walking to the edge looking at a horizon that is blurred by tears as I think just…one…more…step…

And at the last, I see her face. I’m being bombarded with images that are synchronised with the air screaming in my face, machine gun rapid, her smiling, laughing, scolding, crying, one after the other in a series so rapid I can barely comprehend them, on a beach, in a cafe, in bed on the point of orgasm, washing up, and I can feel the warmth and the joy and the love, by a river surrounded by trees, getting out of her car to meet me, eating chips. Naked, clothed, dancing, asleep in my arms on the sofa, a mixture of things that were real and things that could have been but never were and then the images freeze on my favourite one of all, the one I always go back to, a real one, and the realest; her, in front of me in a garden hidden away amidst residential streets, her hair wet from the downpour and a look in her eyes of pure love, as she pulled me to her, looking more beautiful that I had ever seen her before and surely there must be a chance, surely my heart and hers could not be wrong, I must try again, I must! But the ground is only millimetres away now…

No! Wait! I don’t want to d…