Down is versatile. It pulls out of sight the things you love. The sun setting as the hour for sleep draws near; it shreds the skyline into dark holes of silhouettes, trees and their needles testing the edges of an endless golden-blue dimension. You wait like a prisoner for it to go down. Because then it will be like lamps bursting, one after another, fifty miles away—gradually a diffusive brightness above you will lose its cohesion and run into deep blue and then black, oil sliding down a flat canvas. But it also coats the wings of baby robins. Down, that is. For all we know, it even carries aloft the angels of biblical legend. Warmth; a sense of the inner core. Fur and feathers on the outside of a tender patch of skin, connecting the unfelt nerve that reaches from surface to center. Your hair stands up at the same time that your heart begins to beat fast.

Down is a gradual slope of simple rolling relaxation. Close your eyes and wind time back to semi-childhood when you laid on the stubby grass and let go; turning and turning with arms and legs tucked toward your center of gravity. You breathed in a short rush as you rolled over rocks. But the sky always came back. Down your body went until the slope became a plain, sprawling out smooth dirt beneath the sprawled pattern of your innocent limbs. You hadn’t blinked since you began to go down. Your eyes were wide.

Another time like that came later, when you felt the stark exhilaration of closeness, the something next to and within your skin that spoke of higher nature. White-hot alcohol, coursing like a lava flow. It seems almost like suffocation as the throat constricts and expands with each half-swallow-retch. Not the first time, not nearly. You never got quite used to it, because of the similarity to rolling on the downs. Memories had a special, honorary place in your head. Even when that head started spinning, you continued downing the scotch, jeered or cheered on by everyone in the bar. Less a competition than an acknowledgment of victory.

Now that you’re much older, there are no barriers to looking back and realizing that in all those situations you never knew what was down and what was up. The loss of your wife. She didn’t bother to close her eyes in the hospital bed, but kept on staring at the clear white ceiling as you crumbled around her. You held her hand. She hadn’t the strength to hold yours. You fainted, briefly, when it happened, as if her departing soul couldn’t completely detach from yours, and they both went up together for a suspension of moments—she was a rocket to heaven, and you held on until you got cast off by the force of antigravity, like so many loose parts. An extra fuel tank, spent and no longer needed for the journey’s next stage.

You wish you could fix your life on the meaning of down. It seems elusive and foundationless; there is no end to its path. You could fall into the hole of a forest silhouette, and fall forever. Pain and loss and regret whirl around themselves and form one solid piece of something unknown, a new state of matter, intangible and just out of your grasp.