Falling . . .

They say your life passes before your eyes just before you die. No one ever says who “they” are, of course, and I always scoffed at it, until it happened to me.

I snapped into consciousness to a feeling of weightlessness. For an eternal moment I felt suspended in midair. A feather wafted on the breeze. Blue sky and fat white clouds rose above me, shafts of sunlight shot through the clouds to illuminate a steel gray expanse of water far below. Sounds assaulted my ears; screeching tires, blaring car and truck horns, crunching metal and screaming children and adults. A sense of vertigo suddenly gripped me, and then I was falling.

I tumbled out of control, careening downward, my eyes focused on an enormous red suspension bridge. I was falling from a bridge. How did I get here? My heart hammered in my chest, the blood roaring in my ears as my body righted itself turning on some internal instinct to place my feet beneath me, toes pointed towards the slate gray far below. My gaze rolled to the sea, knowing I was about to die. Why was this happening? How did I get here?

The last thing I remembered was driving off to clear my head after that stupid fight with Izzy. How was I to know what time Gaby needed to be ready for her Easter pictures if she didn’t tell me? Apparently I was supposed to be Nick the mind reader. Isobel and Gaby appeared in my mind’s eye. My beautiful wife with her cinnamon skin, dark hair and laughing eyes; our lovely 5-year-old daughter Gabrielle, dancing around her room in the pink and white flowered Easter dress. Images of my life flooded my vision; teaching Gaby to ride a horse on my parent’s farm, Izzy’s exhaustion and exultation as she held our infant daughter in her arms after hours of labor . . . her shy smile and tears as we said our vows and the wonder of discovering each other as we celebrated our union in the hills of Tuscany. The sorrow and shame of the child we lost early in our relationship, mourned but never named. The highs and heartbreaks of a young man fighting to find his place in the world, the hubris and innocence of college discussions on the nature of self, freedom and truth. Discovering the joys of sex with my girlfriend the summer after my senior year . . . the feeling of exultation and accomplishment as we won the state high school baseball championship . . . running and laughing with my brother, riding horses with my Dad, my Mom’s warm smile as I handed her a mother’s day card when I was ten, Grandma reading books to me when I was very young. Christmases and birthdays . . . all the moments great and small that make up a life.

My eyelids fluttered as gravity pulled me to my inevitable end. Only then did I notice the two small mounds that tugged gently at my chest as I gazed between them at the angry waves. What the hell? Suddenly a sense of utter wrongness washed over me. My body just felt wrong.

“Why am I . . . why am I a girl?” I thought as my feet arched of their own accord, cutting a path through the void of salty water as blackness claimed