Falling

Every morning, I drive myself to work half asleep. I am perched on my scooter, like a little bird on the edge of a branch, wings aflutter, half waiting to fly away somewhere. This hard and lumpy body of mine, fifty odd kilos of flesh and inertia, is here, here, here, but me, I am elsewhere, moving someplace else, every place else but where I am supposed to be going. I am an instinctively cautious driver, my body attunes itself to the road even as I shut out the noise, the insane honking, the indescribable sound of a world that has forgotten how silence used to feel. In that other secret world, there is a quiet place where the sounds of silence are cherished. In that other secret world, the heart is still. The constant hankering for something, the craving for everything needed and un-needed, that unstill feeling is dead. The other secret world moves in, to a fleeting intersection of this one. I twist the accelerator with my fingers, cold flesh on warm metal and zoom on through the intersection zone. The crunch of metal, the splash of broken glass, a squirt of blood, I fall through to reality.