When I was two or maybe three, my father
liked to carry me around the house in a
laundry hamper. He’d swing me back and forth,
higher and higher, until I could feel that numb pressure
between my ears: the one that sinks like a glassy
marble down your throat and into your stomach, the kind
that marks the shift from up to down, the moment
when everything pauses

                  and a second feels like twenty years and you
realize that this is now and then will never exist again,
if it ever existed in the first place. As I came hurtling
down to Earth, imagining I was a comet or something
as explosive, I laughed, because this was dangerous, a
nd I could never be sure I wouldn’t fall.