Between The Guard Rails

One thing I will never get to do is run my car off a cliff. Only because I’d die. I imagine the pure feelings of fear, joy, that sinking, falling feeling in my stomach, like in a fast elevator going down, the sound of the wind around my car and the ear shattering crunch of it hitting the bottom. I think of the feeling of my whole body collapsing down on itself. Lumbar into thoracic into cervical, my skull resting five inches lower. Do you think I could hear my bones being pulverized? Or do you think it would all happen so fast? I would be a pile of mush in the end. There’s no way I could live to tell about all those feelings, so I just have to imagine.

From time to time I think about driving down the freeway in reverse. Or the opposite direction of traffic. Dodging cars and semis. Weaving and winding, my heart racing, car horns blaring, angry words mouthed at me from windshields, the occasional fist out the window.

It’s nice to have an imagination. It’s safe.

Unlike love.

Love is all these sensations. Falling, yelling, fear, adrenaline, going in reverse, rapture, ear shattering, bone crunching, body collapsing; and that’s just the falling part. Heart pounding, dry mouth, shaking hands, that moment before you fall or jump or drive your car between the guard rails, when you realize what’s happening. Once you’re in that free fall, there’s no way to stop and no belt to hold you to your seat.

Or, that’s how I remember it.

In the end, you don’t think your crumpled body and failed heart will live. Feels like you will never, ever recover, your heart immobilized, your senses numb, your energy shut down to the possibility. Love eventually resolves though, but, who would ever want to fall again after a trauma like love? But you do, I do. And thus begins life again.

Why do I do this to myself? I’m not in love now, not even close, fighting hard not to be. Jumping from a cliff sounds better, there’s no recovery, no cycle to begin again.