One Terrifying Pull Downwards

"It's fun.  Just don't focus on the height.  Focus on the edge.  Just get your mind set and then, when you're ready, jump."  Having imparted his wisdom, Kyle abruptly leapt from the cliff upon which he stood, falling thirty feet and leaving behind only a splash in the water below and me bewildered on the ledge above.

I have never been cliff-jumping before.  How I came to be standing atop one now was becoming an ever greater concern to me as Kyle emerged from the water and stared, waiting for my jump.  Don't focus on the height.  Ok, not focusing on the height.  Focus on the edge.  Well, I'm already standing on it.  When you're ready... There's no way I'm jumping off this fucking cliff.  Jump.

The body isn't used to being airborne.  I panic in midair and wave my arms wildly, as if I can reverse my current direction.  It's ineffective; air moving rapidly by my ears makes a progressively higher pitch, like I'm filling up a glass of water, except the whole equation is inverted.  I'm falling into a glass of water.  The pitch gets higher and higher until, with alarming volume, gravity releases its hold on me and I'm underwater.

When I pop up to the surface, Kyle asks if I'm OK.  "It sounded like you hit pretty hard." he says.  A minute later, on shore, I see that the underside of my arms have turned red from the impact, and my mentor informs me that the left side of my face is a similar color.  Kyle asks if I want to call it quits.  Quits.  Why is that so familiar?

My memory skips back into place.  Last week I quit my job at the department.  I wanted to find a new one before I left, but that place was intolerable.  One day I called in sick, then called back and told them I was done.  Work is scarce.  Just now I realize that for the last thirty seconds I haven't been thinking about my job, probably for the first time since I quit.

I'm back up the cliff before Kyle knows what's going on.  I make three more jumps that day, and with each conclusive impact I forget something else.  The car payments.  My uncle's health.  The - what was it?  All right.

Between throws I figure out why jumping has its strange effect on me.  It's the immediacy.  It's the impending, tangible, unstoppable doom.  I can't remember when my days turned from a series of youthful (mis)adventures to a paycheck-to-paycheck sluggish assassination, but I remember the feeling.  I used to push at life, running as fast as I could into whatever was next, good or bad.  Now, though, it's like life slowly pulls me forwards whether I want to go or not.  When I jump, I reclaim that immediacy, that sudden onslaught of the inevitable.  Misfortune isn't taking its time like a tumor.  It's not slowly drawing life from me the way an application does every time I write my Social Security number on it.  It's there, right in front of me.  In a second I'll be there, without any of the inane chatter or thank you cards or endless attempts to impress women that are symptomatic of Death's other modus operandi.  Whatever extractions some dealership is looking to make from my bank account can wait until I have ground beneath my feet.  And they do.

After a half hour, Kyle excitedly asks "Are you ready for the big one?"  'The big one' is a fifty foot drop, and if you're not careful you'll be impaled in a log at the bottom which he says is eternally lodged there.  The sobering peril of this cliff grounds me as the stupidity of my actions sinks in.  "No," I reply, and he comes back down the hill.

Kyle and I start back through the woods.  His arrogant silence gives me room to figure out today's events.  "I got excited," I tell myself, "but that's no reason to feel bad about - to feel bad about life."  Reality wraps around me when we get to the road, and I kick myself because I've missed a dentist appointment.

The next day I grudgingly tie the shoelaces of my running sneakers, pushing out the thought that jogging is one of those chores we undertake to prolong our march towards death.  My route takes me into the woods, and almost without thinking about it I find myself at the same gorge where I temporarily plummeted to my re-awakening not twenty-four hours ago.  I throw off my clothes and dive from a ten foot ledge into the steely October water.

I climb out on the other side and start my ascent towards my favorite natural diving board.  I pass the path to the thirty foot cliff and keep moving up the hill.  As soon as I do, I recognize the sound of my heartbeat.  It grows louder with every step, and when at the edge of 'the big one' I have to sit down for fear of a heart attack.

After about a minute I stand up and survey the view from atop my fifty foot perch.  The leaves haven't given up yet, and they still cling tightly to the trees, but I can tell that they don't have much left in them.  Don't focus on the height.  The height is irrelevant.  The rent does the same number on my psyche as Ray's cancer; they're all just problems without solutions.  Sure, Uncle Ray's is more serious, but a cliff is a cliff, no matter what the height.  Focus on the edge.  If I walk away now the edge will still be there.  My problems don't go away.  The edge is a gatekeeper, but it's not holding me back.  It is the epitome of neutrality, serenely guarding the barrier between fear and flight.  Get your mind set. If you're not ready, the whole drop will be one terrifying pull downwards.  It's only when you're willing to learn that it can teach you anything.  I have got a lot to learn.  And when you're ready

Jump.

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