I have a fear of heights but I don’t have a fear of death.
There’s a city of ants below me, scurrying off to their menial, routine lives, and I tower over them like a god. A god that’s scared of heights, and flying, and falling, and everything above.
I peer over the edge. The world below tilts, stretching away from me. My vision becomes spotty and a strange fuzziness settles in my jaw. My heartbeat quickens to the point that I can practically feel it pumping out of my ribcage. I ball my fists up, restless, searching for something solid to hold onto. I look around. The plane is small – claustrophobically so. The tin cabin is void of embellishments and stripped of comfort, as if designed to be as unwelcoming as possible. It feels less like a machine built for flight and more like a coffin built for the sky.
“You ready to jump?”
“Sure, I guess…”
Against my own will, my eyes drift back outside. The sky is impossibly wide, stretching high above in a way that shows just how much greater it is than me. Despite this, it’s empty. I have nowhere to look but down.
“I deal with death all the time,” I say, maybe to the instructor, maybe to myself.
He laughs.
“You’re not going to die.”
The instructor’s voice is low and steady, the kind of voice built for reassurance. I wonder if mine ever sounds like that, when I tell people the opposite, that death is just another stage of life. I wonder if comfort comes from confidence, or just from saying the same words over and over again. I glance back at the instructor. He doesn’t hesitate. Maybe he believes what he says. Or maybe, like me, he’s just learned how to sound like he does.
He jumps.
The air swallows me whole. For the first second, maybe two, there’s a pressure pushing against the weight of my own body. Then it stops. Instead, the wind wraps itself around my limbs, cradling me, comforting my thrashing pulse. I think about how the still-hearted don’t get to feel this, the impossible sensation of weight and weightlessness at the same time. I think about how bodies fall in different ways. The way some are stiff, as if bracing for impact, while others are loose like they’ve already let go. I’ve seen it at work, the way some hands stay clenched, while others are open and empty. The way a body can tell a story even in its final moments.
I can tell, just by looking, how they fell.
And as I fall toward the Earth, I wonder which I am.
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