Fall-ing

This week, our contributor ushers us toward autumn with a story about falling. If you are interested in receiving the writing prompts that inspire our guest contributors’ stories, please sign-up for the newsletter on the ‘let’s talk’ page.

Walking with my mother one day, I fell from a pair of clogs. They were so high and loose that my feet lolled around in them like tongues inside of mouths. Years earlier my mother had fallen one block away while carrying a bag of groceries up a curb. It was the shopping area of our neighborhood, so people gathered around to help her. I was always surprised when my mother got into a bind and the Universe was there to look after her. Ever since I was a small child I refused to believe that she was safe unless I could see, hear, and touch her—the way I exist for my dogs now.

Before I fell that day while walking next to my mother, I must have already been reading British psychotherapist Adam Phillips because I took a photograph of myself after the fall. In his book On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life, Phillips writes “Accidents become disowned intentions; other voices speak through our mistakes.” and “Accidents become the best way, indeed the only way, of doing some things.” Over the years I’ve interpreted this to mean that I fell so that a life I had not lived could get my attention. I took the photograph of me skinned up that day to maybe glimpse the life that got away.

About four years ago, after moving from the city to the country, I fell in love with a local guy I will call H. I don’t know how else to put it since you can’t really love someone until you’ve spent lots of time with them, until you don’t freak out because they eat Pringles and do not shave the back of their neck. At any rate, I did fall, and I have stayed there even though I am up and about. We have been on a few dates over the years, some disastrous and some sublime. I think of H. every day, yet there is no way I can really date him. Besides the fact that H. and I have barely anything in common, I live with my ex-boyfriend and current business partner, am married to a store that my ex and I own, have high maintenance dogs that I cannot leave for more than six hours, teach art, do illustration and sewing side jobs, play tennis as much as possible, and spend time with my best friend in the city.

My ex-boyfriend roommate says that if he sees H. ‘sniffing around,’ he’ll tell him to get lost. I hate that term ‘sniffing around’ because it sounds nasty, like H. and I are just a couple of dogs (which makes me a dog that fell from a clog). I keep meaning to tell my ex that it doesn’t make sense to chase H. away. Besides the fact that my ex is my EX, I am the one who flirts with H. Which brings us back to Adam Phillips’ book On Flirtation where he writes “Flirtation, if it can be sustained, is a way of cultivating wishes, of playing for time. Deferral can make room.” And having room is good I guess, even inside of a shoe.

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Edie Everette is an illustrator, teacher, and writer who drinks a lot of coffee in the Pacific Northwest.

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