A Permission Called Gravity
written by: Daisy King
He has been falling for forty-one seconds now
and the world still looks like a marble in a boy’s pocket.
The wind in his mouth makes it move
or does he whisper something moving?
It moves like a prayer,
like an apology,
like I hope this is not the end
even though it’s all about the end.
He thinks about the sound of the capsule door—
that sigh of pressure loss
sounded like a mother giving up.
He stepped off anyway. What was he thinking?
The sky doesn’t scream.
The sky just takes you.
Swallows you whole.
Or is it heaven, this expansive thing?
It may be the opposite of a thing.
A nothing. A void. Eternally.
He punches through sound
at 690 miles an hour.
He breaks the barrier and welcomes silence.
Silence, as space, is an absence of something.
A nothing. A void. Eternally.
It feels less like speed
and more like erasure.
His fingers are thrumming inside the suit.
His spine tries to curl in around itself.
He’s trying to self-protect, to hide
from something or the absence thereof.
Protected against nothing.
Hiding from nothing.
There is no ground yet, only the blue
bruising at the edge of the black.
He wonders:
What if I was wrong about the weight of things?
What if I bore burdens I didn’t need to?
What if gravity is not a force, but a permission?
What if the fall is the only true shape I’ve ever had?
Somewhere in the curdle of wind and light
he begins spinning, his body suddenly remembering
that it used to be an animal,
that fear is not intellectual,
that the Earth is a magnet
and he is still metal.
And within the spinning,
a voice in his ear,
the crackling of mission control:
Stabilise, we’re losing you.
He’s not listening.
His eyes are transfixed to the horizon,
which swells into the coastline,
an honest shape.
This is what it means to fall
from the space where weather begins,
to slip through the inkblot
between science and death
and call it courage.
He thinks about his mother
and the lie he told her on the phone:
It’s just another jump, it’s safe
as if anything is ever just a separation
from where you began.
He thinks about his father
who distributed lies like party favours
and everyone saw through them eventually
and everyone kept pretending not to
so the party will never end.
He thinks up a list
of all the lies he’s ever told.
He’s a liar too, but what is truth anyway?
Is he falling or jumping?
Will he say he jumped for his life,
or will they say he jumped to his death?
He thinks about birds
and whether they know they’re flying.
And they’re dying.
Isn’t it the same for everyone?
We plummet towards death
from the moment we began.
Being up there, on the edge of a space
that goes on forever
makes him think about eternity.
He is not eternal, and it’s been only a minute
since he jumped from the shuttle.
The infinity of space can take him
and it would not care.
He thinks about the people who do care.
His family, his ferret, his unborn child,
the morning news, the Guinness Book,
the girls he loved, the women who loved him.
Everything on Earth, from up here, looks plastic,
like it’s not real.
A nothing? A void? Eternally?
Perhaps not. Perhaps it is something full
but only temporary.
For a few seconds he hopes he will die
and this hope takes a new shape—
a coffin, an urn, a needle, a headstone
with his national flag and space helmet
propped up against it.
He didn’t do it for them.
And then—
the parachute blooms.
It blooms like regret,
like grace,
like a second chance.
And still falling,
but slower now—
He trailed his fingers through the stars.
He slipped through a crack in the clouds.
He has control this time.
He has filled up and his parachute,
a balloon of hope and unfathomable stuff—
sights, sounds, metaphysical metaphors,
details and digits, medallions and miracles.
He is full but it is temporary—
And still falling,
slower now,
he names the clouds
as he passes through.
- A Permission Called Gravity - August 10, 2025
- Somewhere Between Rules and the Horizon - May 25, 2025
- Amends - November 11, 2020
