A page from the diary of a Falling Angel: April 28th 2019

The leap was taken after much self-suffering and dismay. It has been about four months since. I am still falling and floating at the same time. I thought the leap would leave me dead on the ground, my head and my heart smashed into tiny pieces. I imagined and expected horror, pain, and death of some sort. I expected the fall to be brief and the death to be imminent. When I was planning all that in my head, it all happened so fast. I jumped, I fell, I died, I was reborn, and I started walking on the earth again. I was pretty sure all that would happen within the first three-four months after the fall. After all, no one keeps falling for four months.

Right: that part was right. No one keeps falling for four months. But I know I didn't hit the ground yet. So where am I? What happened after the fall?

This is where 'reading whatever comes to your hand' comes in pretty handy. I heard one of our housemates had the first two books of Game Of Thrones. As a huge fan of the series, I wanted to read the book in preparation for the upcoming season. I am already reading a book halfway, but when she handed me those giants of books, I couldn't help but start reading the first book immediately. It's a disease! Yes, one of the best you can get infected by in a lifetime. So, there I lay, reading both books day and night: still falling, or rather, still not hitting the ground to smash my head and my heart into tiny pieces. 

While reading, I came to the part where Jamie pushes Bran out of the tower window "for the sake of the things he loves." The scene went by so fast in the TV series: Bran climbed the tower, he saw the fucking, he was pushed by the fucker, he fell, and then we saw him unconscious in bed, all his leg bones smashed into pieces. But of course, a reader trusts the original written words than a later adaptation. And it took the perfectly written Bran's Coma Chapter for me to realize where I am right now. 

In the material reality, Bran did fall fast, as fast as gravity can pull him towards the warm embrace of the earth with a rib-crushing passion. He was lying unconscious in bed for months. It was done. His fate was decided once and for all. In the material reality, he would be a cripple and would never walk or be the Lord of Winterfell. These are bigger aspirations in the material world. In a sense, yes, it is a heartbreaking failure of a life at such a young age. His body stopped after his leap, but his mind was opening up the space for a third eye.

"It seemed as though he had been falling for years," Martin translates the thoughts of his character. In Bran's mind, he was still falling. The mind doesn't get fooled or disturbed by the rib-crushing force of gravity. But it might use that power to open up a crack to reach the core. 

Bran thinks it is a long dream of "falling." I have questioned countless times the true state of my life these days. I HAVE asked whether this is a dream because everything I ever 'dreamed' of in life is here! If everything you ever dream of gathers into one place in front of you, right here, right now, who's to say it's not a dream? Who's to say it is reality? It's my dream, isn't it? What DO you call a dream you are living right now? A dream? A reality? A Dreamiality?

Incidents and moments such as these, where the dream and the realities collide and coexist, are scarce in human life. When it happens after a giant, crucial, fateful leap, during the falling of the mind, it could blur the boundaries between the visible and the invisible. I know I made the leap...I know my mind still did not hit the ground. 

You always wake up in the instant before you hit the ground.

And if you don't? The voice asked.

This particular reality that I live in is in the design, detail, and magnitude of a dream. But what if I am not dreaming? Then the falling is yet to come, and I won't be waking up. I would crash on the earth and turn into particles. But what if my material reality is already done? What if I am lying on a bed crippled like Bran? What if I can't see it yet?

It seems that it is just a matter of time. It is the time I have until I wake up that matters, for now. What do I do until I hit the ground? What do I do while falling, when the falling is this deep that after four months, there's still no sign of the ground? Or is the ground close by, and I have no idea because I haven't looked down yet?

What matters is what you do until you hit the ground. What matters is the time you've gained, the time you give until you hit the ground. 

Right here, right now, the void of a deep, thick silence gets filled up by the sound of water flowing into a fish tank and the occasional sound of the tip of my pen dancing and skating on the old yellow paper. It feels like a dream...

He closed his eyes and began to cry.

"That won't do you any good," the crow said. "I told you, the answer is flying, not crying. How hard can it be? I am doing it..."

"You have wings," Bran pointed out.

"Maybe you do too."

It was a big leap, and the world below is deep. I am certainly not falling into the shallow ground. This is the journey to the depths of life, the depths of mind.

"Every flight begins with a fall..."

I bet it is! All wonderful things exist in the space between the leap and the landing: the Falling. All magic, all wonders, all desires you wanted in life are all packed up in the Falling, in mid-air, where you are neither up there nor down there. All best moments in life appear when you fly through the air, flapping your hands like an idiot, with the wind in your hair; when you lose your sense of time and days become one long journey with many nights, dawns, and dusks in a loop. When you fall, after a giant leap (of faith), that's where you find the true essence of life.

"Can a man still be brave if he is afraid?"

"That's the only time a man can be brave."