I, too, can fall

I, too, can fall

Brett Knepper

At night, I sleep and my fear comes to light. Through that light, I wake and find myself nearly unable to continue the fight of midnight sleep.

How it always goes is that I am a mountain growing higher and higher as a rock in the skies over an ocean spreading into eternity. My peak is like the tip of a blade, piercing and colonizing the sky, making everything my own and conquering with a power my waking self could only imagine. Expand, expand, expand. I continue to reach ever higher until I’m high enough to finally see everything below me. The world is a sprawling stretch, built on the hopes, dreams and desires of everything that ever was, is, or will be.

I’m suddenly standing on top of that mountain, looking out from a throne that I have crafted myself, seeing with my eyes something glorious in the sunshine above. It’s bright, yes, but so am I.

However, I am not the sun…not the center of the solar system. The brightness above grows brighter. Then brighter. It blinds me and I can no longer see the world’s expansion below. I fear that I’ve climbed too close to the sun.

The sun burns the mountain below my feet. It burns the rocky blade and the self-made throne until nothing is left but empty sky.

I fall.

It’s not a graceful fall, where you feel the wind resting its hands across your back as you drift away, but a brutal fall, where you plummet from the top of the world and struggle in the air, trying to grab something, anything, to save yourself. But you continue falling because there is nothing. No longer stands the mountain where you once were, nor the throne where you once sat. There is no safety net, for safety had been an afterthought. Between my body and sky is air, sunlight and an eternal fall.

I wanted to make something of myself. It was my dream to be someone people looked up to — the conqueror of my own dreams. But I’ve grown too high and found my mountainous self collapsing, just as quickly as I formed it.

That’s my fear. Failing when everything appears to be going just right. When I look into that vast expanse across the distance and finally feel I’m in the place I always dreamed of being; when I’ve become a galaxy above the world below, I realize I’ve fought too hard, grown too tall. I fail. And then, I fall.

Every night, the same dream comes and goes. I rise as a mountain and fall as a man. The sun, a celestial beacon that knows my place, forces me down with the resistance only a god could bear. I’m reminded each night that I’m nothing more than a man, living life based on foolish dreams and ideals.

In the waking world, I am often aware of my mortality. Everything I dream of, all those wishes of wonder and fulfillment and desires of finding myself and forming a stable mountain, are just that… dreams. I know that I may never find a following outside of my own parents. I know that I may never be a beacon to the world outside of my small group of friends. But at night, when my eyes close and the moonlight creates a mirage in my mind, I let the vision take hold and imagine what it could be like to have everything. To be everything…

Imagine the world taking shape below, as you, the highest mountain, reach with all your might toward the sun and the light. Your fingers can almost grasp it; the heat of the celestial orb is closer than ever. While waking is imaginative, that moment becomes real.

But, before you can reach, your moment of glory is up and fear takes hold. No one can stay at the top for long. All it takes is a moment too close to the sun for you to burn up and plummet back to reality…