Falling -Part 1

When you fall, you can never tell how far - eventually it feels like flying and then you hit the ground.

Lester woke up with the sensation of falling. Not the kind that startles you awake, the jolt of your body betraying gravity in the fragile space between sleep and waking—but a deeper fall, one that stretches across years, accumulates weight with every unsent message and every unspoken word.

It was the kind of fall that, if prolonged, starts to feel like flight. But, as every unfortunate bird knows, there is always the ground. And the ground, despite its unwavering patience, never flinches when a body crashes into it.

He lay still, the pain in his abdomen a stern schoolmaster reminding him that his body, too, had grown tired of his indecision. His post-surgical wounds whispered conspiratorially: We told you so.

Ruby had left. Not just the room, not just the house, but the entire continent. She had packed her life into three suitcases, folded herself neatly into their constraints, and walked away, like some reverse Houdini escaping the chains of matrimonial illusions.

Lester pressed a hand against his stomach. He was alone. He was waiting. Or maybe he wasn’t waiting at all. Maybe he was incubating, like a cursed prince in a fairy tale where the happily-ever-after had been outsourced to a disinterested third party.

Ruby had always belonged to the wind. She drifted through cities, through lives, leaving faint fingerprints on the places she touched but never staying long enough for anyone to memorize their shape.

She sat in a borrowed chair in a borrowed office, in a city that belonged to no one and everyone at the same time. She was drinking a cappuccino that cost as much as a minor organ. It tasted of burnt optimism.

Her inbox was full—Jonathan, Christian, Mark—names that floated across her screen like benevolent spirits of capitalism, summoning her toward some nebulous sense of achievement. She had the vague sense that she had won something, that she had clawed her way free of a life that had been devouring her. But victory, she realized, was a dish best served with someone.

She thought of Lester. He had been like a lighthouse, fixed in place, always watching, always calling her back from the horizon. She had once mistaken that for safety, but now she saw it for what it was: a tether. And she, by nature, was untethered.

She left echoes instead of roots, carved memories into the air instead of stone. Love had always been a thing just out of reach, something she might have if she could hold still long enough. But she had never learned how to be still.

He wrote to her, again. The words spilled out in a feverish, unedited rush:

You weren’t the only one supporting this household. I was here too. I am still here. And despite everything, I will do what I can for you, even if I get nothing in return.

But this time, he wrote with a different heart. A different brain, even. Perhaps it was the morphine talking, or perhaps it was clarity, that rare and elusive species usually spotted only in the aftermath of catastrophe. He had fallen once, but he was learning that falling was only dangerous if you never learned to land. And now, he was standing up.

He told himself this was strength. That his love was the kind that endured, that remained, that built. That someday, if the universe willed it, they would cross paths again, and he would greet her not as a desperate man clinging to a past, but as someone whole. And if they found love again, it would be because they had chosen it—both of them, deliberately, like one chooses a tattoo at three in the morning with full knowledge that regret is part of the package.

Ruby read his message late at night, stretched out on the floor of a friend’s apartment, the air mattress beneath her deflating in slow betrayal. The universe was good at irony.

She sighed. I am a coward. I have always run from the things I don’t know how to fix.

And she had run from Lester. From the life they had built, the house, the unspoken expectations, the weight of a love that had turned into something suffocating. She had once thought that if she held on tightly enough, her sheer willpower could save them. But love was not a matter of will, and whatever they had now, it was not love.

She had tried to love like other people did, to stay in place and call it home, to choose certainty over wonder. But she had never belonged to certainty. She belonged to doorways, to train stations, to fleeting conversations that left more questions than answers. She loved Lester. She would always love Lester. But to be with him would mean to stop moving, and she had never known how.

She closed her eyes and let her fingers hover over the keyboard before typing, finally:

I am sorry for how we ended. I love you, but that love is not enough. I want to be happy. And I don’t believe that happiness is with you.

She hit send before she could take it back. And then she cried, because sometimes the hardest thing in the world was not the leaving, but the knowing that you might never go back.

Lester stared at the message. Read it again. And again. And then, something peculiar happened. He smiled.

Not because he was letting go, not because he had lost, but because he had finally understood.

Ruby was the kind of love that never ended—it changed, it reshaped itself, it traveled, but it never truly left. They were written into each other’s stories in ink that would not fade, no matter how many years or cities stood between them.

One day, they would meet again. Maybe in another life, maybe in this one. Maybe at a train station where she would be passing through, maybe on a street where he would be buying oranges. Maybe not for years, maybe next week. It didn’t matter.

Because love like this was never meant to end. It was meant to be found, again and again, as many times as it took.  

He reloaded her phone with credit. He ordered a sandwich. And then, for the first time in a long time, he looked forward to the future—not as a waiting game, but as an adventure.

Falling.

You never know how far.

Eventually, it feels like flying.

And then, you hit the ground.

And if you’re strong enough, you get back up.

Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters

Falling: Threads of Light Part 2