The Monologue of the Boy Who Longed to Fall

The world was built for those who stay tethered. For those who crawl, who cling to walls and trace the grooves of their chains as if the touch of rusted iron were something holy. But me? My body sings a different hymn. My body aches for the edges of things—the splintered ridges of cliffs, the burning precipices where the air turns thin and alive. It’s not the flight I crave. No, no—it’s the fall. To fall is to finally feel.

I wake in the night, dripping with sweat, and dream of the weightlessness. My arms stretch to the ceiling, tracing wings that are not there, fingertips grazing the echoes of feathers I will never own. The sheets cling to me like a lover who doesn’t know how to let go. Their dampness chokes, and my chest rises and falls in frantic bursts as if I’m already plummeting.

And it’s beautiful—this imagined descent. This slipping free of gravity’s leash, the way the air might rush up to meet my skin, not as punishment, but as a caress. Soft, insistent, unraveling me like the petals of a wilting flower. And then there’s the pull of the earth below, the final, hungry embrace of it. Sometimes I wonder if the earth herself is in love with the falling ones, the ones who offer themselves willingly. To fall is to be swallowed—to be devoured, sweetly, whole.

Do you know what it is to want to fall? Truly fall? Not to stumble, not to fail, not even to die—but to surrender. To peel back the layers of yourself and let the sky eat you alive, let it scrape away every pretense, every rule, every whisper of restraint. There’s a purity in that kind of unraveling. A violent, radiant truth that only comes with the shattering.

I think of the boy who flew too close to the sun. They call him foolish, but I know better. I know what it’s like to crave the burn, to stretch toward the light even as it blisters your skin. They say he didn’t understand the fall, but I think he knew. Oh, he knew. He loved the heat and the rush and the reckless beauty of the ending. I think the boy and I would have understood each other.

I catch glimpses of my fall in the smallest things. The bruised curve of a fruit before I bite into it. The sharp glint of sunlight on a blade, its edge promising both pain and liberation. The way my reflection wavers in the surface of water, rippling as though it’s about to consume me. I lean closer to the water sometimes, let my lips touch the surface, tasting the cool nothingness that waits beneath.

There’s a part of me—deep, feral, and clawing—that wants to strip myself bare in the face of this world’s expectations. To rebel, not in fire or fury, but in surrender. To leap, to fall, to give myself to the open air and let it take what it will. The sky would strip me of my name. The ground would carve me into something unrecognizable. And maybe that’s what I need: to lose myself to find whatever’s left.

I think of him again—the boy with his melted wings and his scorched dreams. They call him Icarus. I call him prophet. He knew what they never will: that falling isn’t failure. It’s freedom. It’s transcendence. It’s the exquisite agony of letting go.

And so I climb higher each night, standing at the edge of myself, at the edge of the world. I feel the wind lick my skin, cool and sharp, as if to say, “Come.” I lean forward, just enough to feel the pull. And though I stop myself—for now—I know the day will come when I won’t. When the fall will become my final, beautiful prayer.

Because falling isn’t dying. Falling is living. Falling is tasting every last drop of life in the seconds before the ground rushes to claim you.

Falling is the only thing that ever felt like love.