Awareness in Falling

I am so tired. I am so grateful that I listened to my body earlier, just now a couple of hours earlier, my body that told me one thing: relax. Fall into yourself.

Now I have had two glasses of wine. Or, rather, what I think are two glasses of wine, because the lonely “wine glass” that exists in my apartment is in the dishwasher. And while sometimes I am invigorated by that one glass of wine, immediately after my first few sips I knew I had made the right decision, because I felt exhaausted, removed, as though my body was falling into itself.

When I was eight years old, at one of my first "sleepover parties", at Betsy’s house, my friends promised me a sensation so powerful that even gravity would be defied. “Relax,” they said, and we were eight, and we were trying “new things” – as new as eight-year old girls did in 1985, and I was excited, and not even a little bit scared. I lay flat, stomach down, face down on the shag carpet that was so popular at the time, and I heard the giggling, the “shushes,” the ever-quieter jabbering. “Relax – and we’ll make you fall through the floor!” said Betsy, and I relaxed, they quieted, and the lights turned off as I closed my eyes.

Blackness: vision replaces itself with a dark, infinite space. Silence: hearing bends back into itself and is replaced by noiselessness. The odor of the dog-stained rug disappears, and I am still, so still that my touch sensors are desensitized. And these eradicated senses fade into nothing, or perhaps re-form into everything: there is absolute emptiness and intense fullness, simultaneously, yet none of which I am consciously aware. I am not sure if the gentle upwards tug on my arms, the slight touch against my palms, is real or imagined, if my spine is actually being arched backwards, if my head is truly being lifted up and tilted behind me. There is no external awareness at all: all I am is my body, all that is is my body right now, or my mind, maybe, because that’s where all the questions are, the anticipation. Then even the mind starts to quiet, as even gravity begins to lose its power, because my body – this obviously massless, formless figure, like a spirit transcending a wall – is, indeed and suddenly, falling through the floor, and I feel that falling and no other sensation. And my stomach is the first to turn on again, because it flips, and then in response I frantically flip open my eyes, afraid that I am really falling through the floor, which of course I am not.

But when I do open my eyes and immediately tangle myself up into a sitting position, I am sorry I did. I have also tangled myself up mentally again, with the lights blaring in my eyes and the girls’ voices skipping like grasshoppers and the harsh smell of popcorn invading my nose. I want to go back to the place I was in, to the space of myself. I liked the simplicity of total awareness, and I am eight years old and far too young to know that total awareness is not always simple.