I fell first. I know that. I’ve known it for a while now. It wasn’t the kitchen floor, or the alley, or any of the dozen times I’ve buried myself inside her and forgotten my own name. Those were merely symptoms. The disease started earlier.
I think it was the playground. Thanksgiving evening, hiding and watching her as she stood at that chain-link fence and cried over something I didn’t understand. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and kept standing there anyway, and I thought, This woman carries something enormous, and she carries it alone, and she has never once asked anyone to help.
How could I not fall for her?
That’s when it happened. Nothing slow or gradual about it. Snap went the solid ground beneath me, and I fell and fell and fell. Completely and utterly done for. Ob
