Paradise Lost - Love Falling

John Love stepped forward and he was falling.

That step, those sixteen inches, which, on any given day, would carry him from one room in his apartment to another, became the stride over a threshold into another world.

Falling.

The blurring sheen of The Towers sped by. A forest of steel and glass brilliance that had housed all his desires. Sliver trunks, with crowning tops of refuge and carnality, kissed where the sky met the blue. Their roots, deep in the ground and the past, were lost in the brown of The Fogs below, where a mass of humanity scuttled and scraped. Gone were the days of skyscrapers that clunked and stacked their way towards the light. The Towers offered those who could afford it, a place of illusive tranquility where the life lived wove itself together with the life desired.

Falling.

It was only a matter of time until the brown pillows of The Fogs enveloped him and he plunged into the eternal dusk that was the lower city. The masses living there ran an endless race across darkened streets like frightened mice, while above in the light, snowy owls perched, digesting their last meal.

Falling.

In the polished windows he caught his own reflection. A man plummeting through ether, wind flowing through his hair and clothes.

"Like a descending angel," he thought, "riding the warm winds of heaven.”

“Did others before me feel the same?”

“We jump every day in this city, every hour, decedents of Icarus burnt by the sun, our wings not enough. The towers of Babel we built no longer sufficient. Never reaching to the heights of our wants. No, not our wants, those are cared for in excess; our Ātman – our self, our true needs.”

An updraft caught and flipped him. His eyes met the mystery of The Fogs below where perpetual dusk, keeping a protective hand over inhabitants and rumors, shadowed a world where life was lived as it always had been.

Births. Deaths. Struggles and joys. Old men wandering, looking for lost loves. Young women yearning to be free of protective mothers. Learning, growing, reproducing, entertaining, killing, saving, jealousy and moments of peace. Those below worked for their existence, slaving away to find a crack to live in, a place to earn and save themselves. Survival, the king currency, led some to achieve and others to bleed, knowing nothing of the fulfillment of lusts happening a thousand feet overhead.

Above, every desire, and more, were met. Below, wants were weighed out against needs and life was measured in the balance.

“We are cousins of a sort,” he pondered. “Searching for fulfillment. Discovering its costs.”

Falling.

Every night The Tower news broadcast took pains to redirect its viewers away from the grim reality of those that had jumped. Rather, the bland newscaster, in her best stock market ticker voice, would intone a warning.

“Tonight, forty-three persons accidently fell from the towers. Please use caution when accessing roof terraces.”

Accidents happen to the old and the clumsy, but John was 39 and in the prime of life.

“We jump and we are never found. Lost in death as in life.”

In reality, no one from The Towers took the time to look for those who had “accidently fallen”. Why leave a paradise to search for someone who forsook it. Let the dead bury the dead.

John knew this truth and to comfort himself, he imagined that upon impact the body was pounded into microscopic dust.

“Specks.

One on a wall.

One on a lamppost.

Another on a lady's hat.

And the rest blown out to sea or into space on the exhaust of a ship to the stars. Either way, found or lost, pieces of you drifting forever. A return to the elements.”

The winds that rode The Towers crystalline surface began to roll John over and over, a leaf on the autumn air. He caught glimpses of cloud… building… sky… cloud… building… sky – over and over until they blended into one beautiful collage of color and light. A living montage, awakening revelations with each revolution, images familiar – images distant.

He found part of himself in his apartment, turning, turning; slow circles on the pristine floor. There around him were the apparatuses that served him in daily life.

The Cuisine Center, producing on-demand endless varieties of food to whet or satisfy the appetite. How quickly he had taxed the machines resources only to return to the comforts of apple pie and lemonade.

Beside it, morphing and folding to conform itself to the aura of the moment, the Mood Mezzanine created a cocoon of comfort.

“Like returning to the womb…or wanting to escape it for lack of air?”

The Viewscreen, which gave him depths of entertainment that could drown a man or allow him to float in stunned silence, was always illuminated. The horrors and wonders of worlds created.

Not far away, in a private corner, stood The Actualizer, bringing him a growing variety of exotic fantasies. Like an arsonist’s fetish, each encounter an intense sensation fanning his desires towards a blaze greater than the one before.

His newest convivence, the stainless-steel Stabilizer, hung from the wall with its colored pill selector. Red, Green, Orange – all to place you in the perfect state of mind, or no state at all. The Yellows. The Blues… he had never taken the Blues.

"I'll have to try those…” the thought pulled him up short.

"Well…the Reds never really lasted and the Yellows made me vomit. The Blues…what would they do?"

Turning, his vision swirled as his apartment faded into saccharine and dreams.

Sterile walls became placid trees and polished floors grew grass, greener and deeper than any Green pill. A warm dark soil welcomed the hands of a small boy. Blackened fingernails like backhoes, moved the precious earth into lines of conformity. Pebbles were piled as barriers, humped earth like hills, and through the dirt, guided by small hands, were playthings, red… green… orange… yellow… blue, racing round and round. Noises of motors and horns, calls and laugher. The sun, piercing the back of the neck like a dagger, cut sharp shadows on the soil.

Falling.

Blades of grass transformed into a million points of shining diamonds. Sun tipped waves – the ocean – stretching out to the horizon. Near the shore, the liquid, languid and clear, rippled around the waist of the same boy. His thin legs creating dominating towers for the brightly colored fish; red… green… orange… yellow… blue, to swim round and round. A step – the colors scattered in a blur. A splash – arms stroked the mild water. A life propelled through a million sparkles of memories.

John reached with cupped hands and kicking legs, pawing the currents of air around him.

"Visions of the past or dreams of the future?" he asked himself.

Clouds… building… sky… clouds… building… sky… clouds… building… her.

She danced beside him, an apparition on the air, a partner from another place and time. Her hair, like a million fine silk threads, wrapped around her translucent frame. Each lock, each strand, a reminder of a day lost to the cravings for something just out of reach.

Ghost hands, haunted with touches of fidelity and purity, stretched towards him. Their dying and broken fingers once held the serenity of moments, but now creaked out a haunting tune of betrayal. Her darkened eyes, where comforting reflections of the sun had brought warmth and devotion, now held the Mammons of the endless everything.

She fell, just as he did. Twin shooting stars called to obey gravity and forget what lay suspended above hell. He, burning out. She, an already lifeless wraith, drained and scoured by abundance.

Falling.

Stretching out, he reached for her fading grasp that brushed his fingers like a racing wind.

"Hold tight,” he called.

They were falling; away from the everything and into the fullness that was to come. 

Falling, into a city where mice scurried home to dream dreams of snowy owls swooping from lonely towers in the sky.