Watch Them Fall

Watch them fall. Never mind their mucklucks-Merrell’s-Ecco’s-Uggs. They fall when they expect to fall and they fall when they least expect to fall. The only time they are not falling is when one has just fallen. Book bags flung to the trees, friends toppling with them. A twisted ankle here. A whacked kneecap there. Bruised elbows, lost hats, torn jeans, twisted boot heels. My god, how they fall.

It is as though the campus is the fascination of some nothing-better-to-do-deity. I can just see her up there, elbows propped on a stiff, white cloud, chin resting atop two gigantic, ephemeral fists. She winks and another student goes down. A sniffle and two more plow into a snow bank. Pray for them, as they are growing in so many awkward ways: ears bigger than palms; arms dangling to knees; gangly, boy-legs longer than hemlock boughs. Some have cheekbones cut like icicles; others, still baby-faced and soft as snow.

The goddess does not discriminate. She does not care. Beware of yesterday’s puddles, which by nightfall morph into glazed mirrors of death. Beware the untouched snow, it’s hardened sheen a mere façade of stability. It will not hold them. Nothing can. Not now, when they are so unstoppable in their frantic fumbling for the next great thing.