Falling Is Like This

I held the ladder as he climbed. He reached his arms high to fix the tile in the ceiling. I looked up to watch. His shirt was untucked, and for a moment, I caught a brief glimpse of his stomach. It was an ordinary stomach. It was what you'd expect a sixty year old man's stomach to look like. There was nothing strange about it, and yet, seeing it somehow changed everything.

I remember thinking, even then, how odd it was that he should be so ordinary. How peculiar to think that underneath those clothes he had a body just like anyone else. How curious to know that he was simply human.

Because before that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that he was, a thought I hadn't realized until I saw that small flash of skin, that small reminder that we were created the same way. This was before he confided in me about his love interest. This was before I made visiting his apartment a regular occurrence. This was before I understood his loneliness and struggles, before I understood my own loneliness and struggles. This was before I understood what it meant to live a life.

This was the first time he fell. As he stood there on the ladder, I felt the pedestal I had placed him on within my mind slip from beneath his feet. I felt the heaviness of his body hit the floor. I felt the earth move. And within me, something changed. I looked at my mentor. I looked up searching for answers in his face, as a child does, as a hungry animal looks at its owner to plead for food. I needed something from him. I needed for him to look back down at me and have the answers. I needed him to still be the person I had created out of faith.

But when he glanced down and smiled his knowing smile, it was different. He was different. I was different. And we stood there, two adults with too many questions and too few answers, looking at one another as if for the first time. Of course, he couldn't have known what I was thinking. He couldn't have known what I felt in that moment, that great crack in the universe, that great shattering of an ideal, but it certainly felt as though he did. It certainly felt as though he understood that his days as a superhero were over, that he would have to turn in his mask and cape, that he would have to settle now for a more simplistic human identity. It seemed to me that he was okay with such a thought, and I realized that I was too.

It is funny to be reminded that you are just a girl, that he is just a boy, that we are all just human. It's funny the way admiration creates this aura of invincibility, of nobleness, of heroism. It's funny the way we create small Gods in the people we love. I think of this as you list for me your faults, as you inch the pedestal of infallibility out from under your feet. You fall. You rise. And then we are just two people standing side by side, broken and vulnerable, honest and real, open and beautiful. Then we are just two people whose imperfections are perfect.

And it is only after you have slipped from grace that I realize the depths of my love for you, how I could be perfectly content to spend the rest of my life falling into such an abyss.