A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall

by Andy Abramowitz

For some people, it was their job that prompted them to ask Is this it?, and for others, it was the person across the table.

Karma was merely the demonstrable truism that bad shit happened to everyone if you waited around long enough.

Right there in that greasy spoon, Davis became achingly conscious of the volatility of time. It spun everyone around, holding all of humanity together with great centrifugal motion, until the wear of the tracks and the rust of the bolts flung everyone wildly away from each other into outer spaces.

“The best and the worst things in life are sudden, Ms. Winger. Everything else takes too damn long,” Richard said.

And once again, Molly marveled at the vast, limitless ways in which the extroverts failed to grasp the introverts, how the fighters would never understand the fleers. She’d

“Listen to me, Molly Erin, and listen good. We’re all terribly unsure of ourselves, each one of us tunneling toward something strange. But you—you are nobody’s shadow. And even if you were, a shadow does not belong to the thing that casts it.

So much of life was holding on to the people and the things that rooted you in the world, so that you didn’t have to wake up each day and start anew.

Peace with the fact that closure might always be denied.

That was what youth was all about: gazing upward into your infinite, star-spangled imagination, daring to envisage all the wondrous thrusts and unknowable trajectories that awaited you.