Waiting for the Floor to Drop

Some notes on fear and levity . . .

Limb-tingling, heart-pounding, groin-aching fear was on me. Focusing on the view of treetops and sky, I tried and failed to calm myself and waited, a vault of held breath.

I had already looked long at the chamber atop a high wooden platform with a trap door on the floor, studied it, said no, walked away twice, and returned. I watched someone else go and survive. Now, I was in the chamber, waiting for the floor beneath me to fall open. There, on the platform to my left were my son, my soul sister, and her son, my little boy soulmate — my extended family in Mexico. We were at a waterpark — one we had visited before during previous trips. And this was the tallest, scariest waterslide. The one with the floor that opens beneath you and then you simply fall through it, freefall for two seconds, then catch the curve of the slide and ride it. It uses that centripetal force of the fall to take you back up again, around a bend, and then drop you a second time for a roller-coaster-like experience. It looked like hella fun. I was terrified.

I knew it was a metaphor, even while standing there in such visceral fear, feeling something else, too, that was quieter, heavier, and less thrilling. Then, the floor opened. It felt like slow motion at first and then all the air was pulled right out of my chest, hard. I tried plugging my nose and keeping my mouth closed but couldn’t hold those positions while fly-falling and whipping around bends slick with water, so it all rushed around and into me, up my nose and into my mouth, what felt like into my ears and eyes, too, there was so much rushing, charging, hammering water and speed … and then it was over. I landed. With a huge wedgie—the whole bottom half of my one-piece bathing suit had wedged itself way up inside my butt crack. Yanking it out, I stood, looked up to the cheering peanut gallery still spectating at the top, and waved.

I yelled to my son to do it, to come down. At ten, this was his third attempt in as many years. Each time before, he got up there and changed his mind.

“Will you come back up and be next to me?” he yelled.

I trotted toward the stairs and went up. By the time I made it to the top, he was already inside the closed chamber, waiting for the floor to drop. My visceral fear returned, but in empathy this time. He shook his head no and I asked the operator to open the chamber. My son jumped out and clung to me.

“Do you want me to go again? Then you go and meet me at the bottom?”

He agreed. I stepped in. Again, I felt the feelings, even while knowing the outcome. This time, I reached down inside me to try and identify that quiet, heavy one. But before I could make contact, I fell.

With the second round, I held fast to my nose, pinching it closed with a single-minded focus and strength I hadn’t mustered in years. This helped reduce the amount of water that entered my head, but the colossal wedgie repeated exactly as before.

Looking up, I watched my son poised, again inside the closed chamber, and silently, I watched him fall. So fast and sudden, he seemed to blink and disappear. The translucent pipe showed his long, slender body shuttled through like a canister through a pneumatic tube and out he came, his swimming trunks bunched so high up around his groin and mid-section, we both immediately started laughing with instant and mutual wedgie empathy.

Climbing out, he announced how fun it had been, how he didn’t understand why he’d been so scared for so long, and how he wanted to do it again. I wondered something silently then — if the consciousness he is that existed before his body and will exist after, the spirit — did it anticipate the coming into this life and body with the same kind of thrilling fear?

This assumes what animates us (energy) goes on differentiated in a similar way, which I theorize it does for many reasons. One reason is because when he was born and I held him on my chest and we looked for what should have been the first time into each other’s eyes, I recognized him in a very real and deep way. It was as though he had always been here.

And then I made contact. I knew what the quieter, heavier feeling mingling in my body with the thrilling, visceral fear was: grief. The surprising kind of grief that attends parenting and that nobody warned me about. The kind that comes with having and raising a child and watching him change so rapidly and so completely that you miss the version of him that just was and will never be again while simultaneously cherishing the new version unfolding before you.

There is something about this waterslide, the experience it offers, and sharing it with my son that makes me think it’s like doing a human life. From the anticipation and the fear to the speed and thrill to the rush and overwhelm and tender, quiet grief. There is invasion and lack of control and vulnerability. There is no stopping it, nothing to be done but surrender. There is the sense of being carried along, swept along a sort of narrative arc through twists and turns toward, for better or for worse, a conclusion. Yes, all the way to the massive, giant wedgie that you’re left to pull out and walk away with at the end of it all, looking forward to the next ride.

Kristen Arnett is a fiction writer who explores flavors of pain like fear and grief through a feminist and queer lens with levity and humor. Two of her novels that I’ve read, Mostly Dead Things and Stop Me If You've Heard This One share these elements, reflecting her distinctive literary voice. Both novels center on queer women navigating personal and professional challenges in Florida. In Mostly Dead Things, Jessa-Lynn Morton grapples with grief and family dynamics after her father's suicide, while in Stop Me If You've Heard This One, Cherry Hendricks, a professional clown, seeks artistic fulfillment amidst financial struggles, the loss of her brother, and complex relationships.

What I love about the novels and about Arnett’s mind, in general, is how the art forms — whether performance or visual dioramas — are metaphors for larger themes of the human condition. Taxidermy, for example, is a literal job for her protagonist but also a metaphor for the human desire to preserve and control memories and relationships, both to stay with vulnerability while also avoiding it, which is so relatable.

I don’t know what happens after we die, but I do know that life involves a series of smaller losses, little deaths. The inevitable attendant of these is grief. What I hope is that these are by design and for practice, in preparation for the ultimate loss of this body, which, much like a bathing suit, will be, if we live long enough, ridden good and hard and, symbolically, bunched up wet and painfully into the most tender parts of us. And when we get there, we will reflect on how fun it was, despite the pains, and try to remember for the next time how much levity, as a tool, truly guides us.