The Fall

When I was a preteen, I was prone to rolling off the bed and slamming to the floor. Bam! My father's sleep was disturbed, but he would think, 'He's fallen out of bed again, ' and go back to his sleep. After so many repetitions, everything loses its crisis status, and takes on the stability of a mural figure fixed in his place. Still the hard floor gave me many dreams anxiously trying to explain my physical plight. I'd dream I was lying on the cold winter ground, exposed to wolf packs or wild dogs. Or the dream placed me on a sidewalk, curled in sleep, as dream-like passers-by passed me without curosity. Only once the rug on which I stretched became an Arabian Nights flying carpet! Mostly the dream persuaded me the cold hardness was just life as we know it, softness and warmth only illusions cast up from primeval depths. But when I awoke, minutes or hours after the fall, I always climbed back into the bed, in need of that lost softness and warmth for the remainder of the night which treated me with such casual cruelty.