Sunday, April 19, 2009

Without a Helmet

My best friend in college had a motorcycle. The summer before I left for good, he fastened my helmet and told me to hold tight and he'd teach me how to fly. The next day, when I did leave, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car behind that very bike. The light changed, and he sped far ahead, clearing me from his rearview mirror. That bike could fly, and I silently swallowed glances at the tires spinning ahead, daring each curve of mountain road to defend itself and vanishing around the next before the last had a chance to reply.

I have noticed that some experiences are so uncommon to the human reality that they can only be described by saying, "it was like I was dreaming." how strange that our dreams and our realities so closely overlap. can something be so real that we are incapable of experiencing it while maintaining consciousness? Dreams, on the other hand, are sometimes far too real to remain in our subconscious. We wake, insisting "it must have been real," and whether it was or was not really doesn't matter anymore. Death and pain are like that. Once you have actually watched someone die, it's all the same.

He flew. I looked up just in time. A sudden tension turned my body rigid, the paralysis of watching one's dearest friend race from a cliff's edge and halt, hanging from an invisible line in midair. My eyes clutched at him, motionless, in the sky, willing him to remain so. The same invisible line held me fast in my seat. My ability to breathe, to remember breathing, failed. Ice-hard lungs turned to empty, broken glass with the effort of suspending time. But gravity would not be restrained, nor the impending pain defied.

He fell. An acid scream rose, shackling my feet, shattering my knees, chasing a boiling-cold sweat to the surface of my arms, and gripping my throat where the suffocating flavor of vomit drowned an unemittable detonation of sound.

Relief did not come upon waking to find myself alone in a dark room, as soaked in sweat and tears as I had been in the pool of his blood. The pain was thicker. No matter that I had leapt from our wrecked car and broken my wrist in an effort to reach his crumpled body. My best friend was dead. I collapsed on the pavement beside his shattered skull and wept until I was not awake or asleep.

***

Funny how it's the most important things that never get said. Maybe we need our dreams to say them for us. It's been another year now, since the night I watched you fall and both our hearts burst on the pavement. Since then I've learned some things that I wish I could tell you.

Funny, how many tears fell because I thought that dream was true, and how many fall now because it wasn't. Maybe I really wept because, the truth is, you're alive, even without me there to catch you.

Funny how, instead, you didn't fall at all; you flew. And maybe if you had, then I would have said goodbye by now. Maybe then I would be moving on.

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