Later, when I was in college, a boy would go missing in the middle of winter. He’d be missing for months, while the search parties tracked parallel lines through flat sheets of virgin snow, while the campus erupted in histrionics, in candlelit vigils, in collections. Missing while his ashen parents moved across the country to our small college town with their other (their only) son, enrolled him in grade school, rented an apartment, posted flyers, waited and waited and waited and waited. Someone would find the boy in the spring, at the end of a long river, a long winter, long dead. He’d drunk too much, he’d wandered, he’d slipped. A freshman. How cold I must have seemed to the people I knew then. I did not engage in the vigils. I did not help in the search. I did not hold a candle. Why, when this boy’s death could only be an echo?

But it wasn’t the familiarity that chilled me, not really. It was my own relief. It was my own ecstatic, overwhelming relief that this time, at least, it had nothing to do with me.

Even later, my mother would ask me: can you imagine what it is like to have your husband renounce passion, aggression, and ignorance? To renounce desire? “For a while, after he left, I tried to embody them all,” she told me. “I let myself indulge in every base instinct. I only wanted to feel human again.” We were sitting in a restaurant. I’d been drinking, she hadn’t. “I’m sorry for hitting you so much,” she said. “It was what I needed at the time.”

You may think I only saw her jump—that I have stretched the moment in my memory, pulled out her trajectory like taffy, so that she seems to float, to wait for me to see her fully before she goes down. You may think that I made her catch my eye, wave goodbye, my own personal Berryman sailing down into the Mississippi River mud. You may, if you are a remarkably attentive reader, think about the height of that overhang, which I only mentioned once, and whether anyone could have distinguished it, in the darkness, from air. You may simply think the whole thing was a hallucination, or perhaps a dream. Folie à trois. Sometimes I would agree with you. But at night, when I close my eyes, I think she did it.

Now I keep a Post-it with the definition of levitation above my paper-strewn desk: stuck there indefinitely with glue, an uncertain magic (polyvinyl acetate emulsions or, barbarically, animal collagen) all of its own.

Levitation (n.) to rise by virtue of lightness, from the Latin levitas (lightness itself).