The Fall

by Tal Bauer

“They often begin subtly,” Dr. Lin says. “Headaches. Dizziness. Sometimes intense emotional experiences. Often, when a focal aware seizure occurs, the electrical impulses of the brain will create experiences that seem indistinguishable from reality. Patients with TLE describe familiarity with the unfamiliar, or complex experiences that have only taken place within their mind, during a seizure. And sometimes,” she continues, “patients experience more complex hallucinations, such as fully-formed memories of events that never happened.”

The water ripples when the next burst blooms, colors sliding over Blair’s forearms where they lock around my waist. I think of all the water that’s carried us: dark waters and golden shores and breakers that tore through our lives, and the rain that sometimes wakes us, soft as whispers from another world. I think about time slips and second chances, about love that transcends logic, about brothers who still love each other from the beyond, and about the terrible grace of losing everything and the fierce joy of working to build it back.

“We made it,” I whisper. “Through different storms.” A breeze lifts the end of the velvet, and it brushes against my ankle. It trails from my fist to our bare feet, pooling in soft curves along the dock boards, the story of us unfurling to its last page. We stand together on the edge of land and sea, two people who came together across time, across pain, across all the barriers that should have kept us apart. Time brings us where we’re meant to be, and I’m exactly where I belong.

But they couldn’t explain to me how I knew that Blair Callahan was the man who would save my life, not only by pulling me out of those dark waters and the sinking Escalade, but by pulling me out of every crashing wave and all the thousand drownings I was succumbing to. Blair saved me in a thousand quiet ways. I no longer need, or want, an explanation. What happened is the map that led us here, to each other and to the rest of our lives. Some might call it fate. Others might say coincidence. I call it ours.

We stripped away the impossible, endured the unthinkable, and built our own reality. And it is so much better than any dream.