The Sound of Breaking
Fifteen years ago, I fell through a skylight and landed in the middle of someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner. It was a hell of an entrance. I don’t remember hitting the table, just the moment right before—glass shards catching sunlight like confetti, a brief weightlessness that felt more like revelation than descent. I’d been up there to retrieve a cat. I don’t own a cat. Technically, I didn’t even know the people who owned the house.
The whole thing reads like slapstick if you don’t know that I nearly died. Not in the operatic, hospital-room, fade-to-black way. Just the slow-motion crunch of ribs against mahogany and a lung that gave up like a sulking child. For months afterward, I had a hiss in my breathing and walked with the defensive posture of someone who knows how easily bones betray you.
During my hospital stay, I received flowers from people who hadn’t spoken to me in years. My cousin sent me a self-help book. The ER nurse told me I was lucky, and I believed her with a ferocity that made me nauseous. I wasn’t religious before the fall, and I wasn’t afterward either. But for about nine months, I was infected with a kind of radical clarity that I still miss the way you miss a dream that seemed important but evaporates as you try to explain it.
I remember going home and sitting in the same lumpy recliner that had always made my back ache. And yet, it felt different, like sitting in the front pew of some quiet cathedral. I watched squirrels with a reverence usually reserved for newborns and told nearly everyone I loved them—even people I only sort of liked. I laughed more than usual. It was a strange, barked thing that made my neighbors peek through their blinds. I wasn’t laughing at jokes, necessarily. It was more like my body had learned a new language, one based on the absurdity of existence itself.
And then, like anything else, it wore off.
The credit card bills kept coming. My hip started clicking. I got a parking ticket and cursed out the meter maid with the same red-faced fury I’d sworn off just months earlier. The lesson had evaporated, replaced by groceries and deadlines and the sting of seeing your ex with someone whose hair does that thing yours never could.
But sometimes, I still feel it. Usually not in the grand moments—not at weddings or births—but in the weird, crumpled corners of life. A little boy in the laundromat who tells his mom that he thinks socks disappear into “a quiet little space where time folds.” Or when my friend Amelia called just to say, “You made me laugh so hard I dropped my sandwich.” That’s when it hits: this isn’t the rehearsal. This is it.
I never thought the fall had meaning. I wasn’t meant to survive. But I did, and that’s its own kind of inconvenient miracle. One that doesn’t require theology or a TED Talk, just the occasional acknowledgment that not dying can be just as instructive as living. Maybe more so.
It’s ridiculous that we need a near-death experience to remember that life is happening right now, with or without us paying attention. But there’s something in our circuitry that seems built to forget. We are the species of distraction, of rehashing past arguments in the shower and thinking about emails during sex. The present is too quiet, too unassuming.
I still think about the skylight. I think about the family whose turkey I ruined. I sent them a card. They never wrote back. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still see their startled faces looking up at me like a Renaissance painting of disbelief. I wonder if they tell that story every November, if I’ve become some mythic figure in their family lore: The Man Who Fell From the Sky. Maybe I am. I hope they laugh about it.
I know I do. Sometimes with that same unhinged, post-trauma bark. Other times, quietly to myself in line at the DMV, grateful to still be waiting, to still be here. A little broken. A little luckier than I deserve. And just occasionally, if the light is right and the world forgets to annoy me, I catch a sliver of that other realm—the one above the clouds, where everything is still, and time can’t reach me.
Caleb Rowan is a nonfiction writer, amateur birdwatcher, and reluctant optimist. He lives in Vermont with his three-legged dog, his mother’s old record collection, and a healthy distrust of skylights.
