There are things you do only when your life is falling apart. I wanted to say, there are things you do only when your life falls apart. It sounds punchier. But the gerund there matters. You have to be inside the falling. The falling is happening now. People claim you need to go to outer space to experience a lack of gravity, but scientists won’t tell you that if you become one with the falling, the rules of gravity no longer apply, that they too fall away, ceding, perhaps, to the rules of grammar. But the land of falling apart is lawless—overrun with a new kind of cowboy traversing a vast, yet-to-be-explored terrain. I have found that terrain here, at the foot of the mountains—floating around like the wisps of clouds or mists, while what is left of me is falling apart at the mountains’ feet. Make no mistake, you need not be dead to be falling apart in real time—to fully enter the gerund. In my postcards, I said as much, but then began the concerned phone calls. I wanted to hear your voice, my oldest friend said. It’s just that you sounded a bit unhinged, my sister said. It’s true, I thought, if she was hinged, I was hinged no longer. Most will never know the inside of falling or its long, tapered hallway toward the falling apart, just as some will never see the mountains dance. Look closely and you’ll see them glide en pointe behind the cover of fog. In the land of falling apart, the mountains host a nightly waltz. Nothing here is fixed, all is fluid like water like a horse’s gait. With his cabinet cards of Sallie Gardner at a gallop, Eadweard Muybridge showed us there is far more to motion than we humans can perceive. So what have I perceived while dwelling inside the falling? At dawn, a baby rooster’s meek cockadoodledoo. At dusk, more mists and with them miscellaneous amphibians. I translate their calls into the night. By day, cows graze in rotation, rest in shade, and then, when their season comes, calve in a giant field. Pastureland like a moonscape, like a teenage boy, going to be good eventually. Falling apart on the farm means swimming with koi, means Queen Anne’s lace and a good patch of milkweed. You can mow around it, or the cows will stomp it down. Inside falling, you can better appreciate the rain. Inside falling, you can commune with the horseflies, get to know the blue-green of their sheen. That cherry tree—one year it’s bewitching, the next it’s on the ground. A commanding heron overlooks the box turtles, the trillium and lily of the valley. I have big aspirations, you know. I don’t need to be the best bushhogger. These fields have seen many. Here in Piedmont, life is alive around me, a show of motion, and I can be the Bore of the Evening—I can be the Bore of the Evening all I want.
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Liza St. James is a writer and editor currently living in Taos, NM, at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. This was written with thanks to Graves Mill Farm.