Falling Up
I arrived at the party a bit heavy hearted. Nothing I could put my finger on, just something I hoped I might leave behind some potted plant for the host to dispose of after the event.
I was drawn to you; let me count the ways. There was a full moon overhead. A portent they say—but that earthly a satellite wasn’t paying any attention to us, busy as it was with managing the tides.
On the moon I would weigh a mere 33 pounds. A bouncing lightweight. And yet, my mass, 90 kilograms, would be the same on the moon as it was at the party. They call that science.
A certain nervousness made me orbit around you at a distance. But your density was undeniable to me, as it turned out mine was to you. Our eyes met at about 25 feet away.
The loft had many rooms. There were party games.
Both wanting to break the invisible force barrier between us we worked our way into playing pin the tail on the donkey. I delighted in your smile beneath the blindfold; the donkey winced, a tail attached to the side of it’s head.
Then there was a tug of war.
Luckily we aligned on the same end of the sheet that was being used in lieu of rope. | trembled as your back pressed against me. Our side lost and you didn’t rush to get up after you collapsed onto me.
Inertia removed, we brought our lips together gently for the first time.
We went for drinks. The beer was a nice English bitter, refreshingly cool at 50 degrees, with a specific gravity of 1.020; but there’s no way either of us would have known this, or cared. We wandered.
In one room on a large screen some space odyssey astronauts were floating in a depressurized cabin. The sound was off, the party’s dance beats filling the space.
No real room for privacy, we decided on a walk in the neighborhood. | grabbed a few cookies and an apple for the journey. As we were exiting | checked my person and real- ized | had misplaced my heavy heart somewhere without even noticing.
Shoes pressing against sidewalk, hands holding onto each other, we dipped into the decades of our lives for fragments to share. You listing the places you had lived; I mine. We imagined a map that would show both our movements over the course of time. At certain times we had been kept in place hundreds of miles apart on the surface of the same planet, and other times we may have even brushed shoulders on a crowded street. And that moon that we now glanced up at was always floating up there. Beyond it the endlessness we could almost fall into.
Passing a small park, near the streetlight we sat under a tree, passing an apple back and forth. On a lawn near some bushes, a small bird was hopping. It had obviously fallen out of a nest but was hard at work with it’s newly feathered wings to do that thing its mother did, to lift off terra firma.
We levitated to your house. Lightheaded and boyant, yet grounded in the solidity of each other’s flesh, we made love, naked under the moonlight coming through the window.
In the morning the sun came blazing in through the window from some 93 million miles away. Later, over a wonderful breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee, we talked about love, aerodynamics, and Sir Isaac Newton.
Published July 2016 as part of the “Two Stories Up!” Series (2016–2017).
Two Stories Up! was an ongoing project that had AleXander Hirka and Tammy Remington (The Anomalous Duo) each composing a new (extremely short) short story every two months which was then sent via postal mail to interested readers.
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© AleXander Hirka 2018. All Rights Reserved.
