For hours, there has been snow, and if my son has watched it with less intensity than the television, I have more than made up for his inattention from the window seat where I have spent the better part of the afternoon watching it fall, the crosscurrents of wind sending it downward first at one angle and then another, sometimes even in circles. Still, whatever way it starts its descent, it all falls, skimming the rooftops before it settles on the ground, filling in all the empty spaces where tires had been, where someone’s feet had walked, filling in all of the holes until the whole thing was homogeneous, until the whole thing looked as though a story had ended, as though we were back to the blank page, as though we had once again to start over. It just keeps falling, yielding to gravity’s unyielding nature, its constant downward magnetism.

We are all bound to it, gravity, its invisible tethers keeping us ever earthbound. Just one of those seemingly immutable laws, a kind of inescapable attraction between a body and another body. Of the things I know for sure, I know that there are people who possess their own gravity. How else to explain how I keep finding myself drawn to them? I know better, remember the feeling of floor beneath my feet, the feeling of ground beneath my knees. The way I held my hands to my chest when I cried, held my hands to my heart, as if I could keep myself from spilling out in such a way, like snow. The house tonight, so quiet, nothing but the falling white all around and the sound of my little heart, my fragile, bandaged, beautiful heart, knocking around in my chest like some kind of errant bird, battering at the edges of its cage, a thing so desperate to fly, to, for just a moment, escape gravity.

Gravity. How else to explain how when that man first held me, my head to his chest, his arm around my body, he offered me solace and sorrow in equal measure. How I was afraid to hold him back because I knew I’d have to let go.

That too, a kind of gravity. It always ends with falling.