Fall (A fourth prose sestina)

A person can’t outline feelings, except as a chalked body silhouette after a long fall. Stripping them down to essentials is impossible.

You’ve asked for an impossible person, and I strip myself anyway, trying to be her. I trace my outline, running my hand across my skin and wondering what’s underneath that makes you miss me and wish I was someone else.

I love fall, but it’s finished early and Indian summer and winter are crashing into each other, clumsy, outside: It’s warm, and the trees are bare. The feeling of the August breeze splitting around bare branches is strange – things that shouldn’t, meeting each other: They should be separated by reds and yellows and crackling brown.

Feeling the breeze is impossible even minus the leaves – falling creates a small personal storm, a cataract with me as the eye. I imagine a person outlined against the sky, desperate for the wind to strip her of secrets on the way down. It wouldn’t. They’d spill out as guts onto the street – too red, too bloody, too vulnerable.

Ancients used to believe that viscera stripped from animals or cradled past muscle in friends and lovers were the seat of feelings. I’m trying to outline why this is impossible. A person falling knows nothing will be fixed by simple exposure.

But the fall itself simplifies, strips a person of feelings impossible to outline. There are only fear and certainty left, as with God. Our solutions are kinetic.

I outline the doctrine of the Fall (we are flawed and struggling and alone) and redemption (it’s okay). It’s impossible for you to strip away disbelief long enough to see that I’m talking about feelings. I’m a person who thinks in faith.

It’s just as impossible for me to strip that away.

You see only my outline when you look and don’t understand my fall from grace. But let me be the bare branches and you will be the breeze – we’ll move through this like a mystery, like strangers. Like the people we wish we were.

When I tell you my feelings, look for that person.