Tumbling Out of Doors

Tumbling. Like a toddler on a dizzy high. Out of doors. Specifically, plane doors. Plane hatches, really, rolled up the side belly of the back of the plane like a garage door in the suburbs, a store front grate on the lower east side, tagged and imposing but easily tossed aside by a ninety year old man with a walker and a candy shop that sports glass pipes and blow in the ice cream freezers. Innocent and random.

Tumbling out of doors into nothing. The dark bar at the end of a midday happy hour special that leaves you with three dollars in your pocket and a seven block walk home; barely enough time to shake the weave out of your walk-your eyes never manage to adjust to the sunlight. And your parachute opens before you're ready. You want to keep tumbling through the next cloud. You open your mouth but you barely manage to think "what the fuck" before spit flies across your face; you're going as fast as you've ever gone for two thousand, three thousand, four thousand - the guy behind you waves his arms frantically and you push him off like, "what the fuck", this isn't happening. The clouds get closer and he clasps your right hand and reaches it back to his right pocket and you tag the rip cord like you're just checking on your exit strategy. The parachute opens before you're ready. And the world slows down again. Your feet are, once again, facing the plate of the planet and the clouds aren't smacking you so much as cradling you as you tug one cord after another, cork-screwing your way into the biggest bottle of booze you've ever seen. The guy behind you tells you to just relax and enjoy the ride. "Think about why you're up here. All the things that made today possible."  What the fuck.

I try to think about all the reasons I jumped out of a plane in the first place. A well-timed email. An amazing friend. A discount. An easy day-trip. A couple of incredible parents. A job. All the things that facilitated the most sober drunk I've ever been. Steeped in perspiration from clouds, spiraling down to the face of the planet, I think about the harness that's kicking the shit out of my groin as the circles exacerbate my own body weight pressing down on the inner edges of the seat belts looped beneath me. I'm having trouble not thinking about mundane things. Like how soon it'll all be over. The ride. The affair with death, a salsa through the sky. It might hurt in the moment but the painful parts will dissipate while the speed and endlessness will live on.

I guess I thought I'd start over. Like plummeting to earth would make it that much easier to prioritize my life. Like almost dying would keep me grounded. Like jumping out of a plane would prove to me how much I wanted to sit still, settle down.

But instead I only wonder why my heart didn't beat faster. Why the ride was over too soon. Why it occured to me several seconds late that the parachute opening meant I was saved. Why it never occurred to me that I wouldn't survive jumping out of a plane. I tumbled through a field of wild flowers and hopped to my feet thinking about all the things I was supposed to be grateful for. And stupidly, I was still as confused as I was on the way up, cramped in a tiny plane, with a sliding door like a chinatown candy shop- why wasn't this as momentous as I objectively ascribed the activity to be? Why wasn't this meaningful or dangerous? Why didn't it force introspection into self like a javelin through a breastbone?

On Saturday, June 6th, I went skydiving, and yet the most dangerous thing I did that day was not wear my seatbelt in the car on the way home. But I will say, falling through the sky with thousands of feet of runway beneath you, breathing in spurts as you figure out how to not choke on your own saliva, being perplexed by the tug of the parachute that opens far too soon, spiraling in complete control through cold, dense clouds, and sliding to the ground a mile from the drop zone amidst wild flowers edged by deciduous trees... abject freedom with a passenger... it's totally worth the confusion that settles in later as the pressures of death seem light and/or your inability to comprehend disaster seems juvenile.

Invincible... I used that word today. I told a girl I wasn't invincible. And I meant it, I believed it, I owned it. But jumping out of a plane? Total piece of cake.