Drop Zone (repost)

I drove blindly through black rain, willing myself not to cry as I navigated unfamiliar roads; the visibility was bad enough. Eventually I found the small hotel I had booked into for the night. I couldn't sleep at all but remained curled up on the hard, strange bed; your last look and words weaving in and out of my semi consciousness. When I finally did sleep, I overslept and woke with a start to find that I was running behind schedule.

As I screeched into the manifest area of an obscure and muddy airfield, everything was drowned in heavy ground fog. I felt doomed to not see where I was going that weekend. How could any small plane hope to take off today in all this muck... Yet the call was to carry on as planned. "When desperate, just do the next thing," a wise friend once counselled. My next thing was to queue up at registration, keep moving, looking, smiling, talking - anything to appear normal. And wait, for change.

Isn't that what everyone does in life, wait for change? For the better or for the worse, for change will come whether you like it or not. A newborn's mother weeps, beholding its momentary perfection that must now deteriorate with each passing day. Soon he would awaken from ambient womb warmth, feel the first discontentment deep within his belly and begin the life long journey of hunger. Soft fleshy feet would become calloused from endless pounding in search of meaning. And eyes would finally open from blissful innocence and forever alight on grins and grimaces, flimsy and frowns, delight and doubt, bemusement and betrayal. And his heartbeat, which was entirely attuned with the even pace of his mother's for nine whole months, would finally know arrhythmia when one day he falls in love, or tumbles out of love and breaks another's heart.

And so we grow up through disillusionment and are always looking for change: change schools, change trains, change jobs, change countries, change homes, change husbands and wives. Are we ever content to remain long in one place or one state of mind and heart? Will the assumed immutables in life always turn out to be shifting sands so we could never cease in our wanderings? Or are we really seeking that old home of darkened comfort in a foetal ball, when we can be blind and deaf to all the hurts that inevitably assail? My incredulity lies in the human capacity to hope against the odds, despite the unstoppable hurtling towards degeneration and death, that change for the better is still an option to be grasped. Some call that folly; some call it faith.

And so I waited in the cold airfield, fighting off all thoughts of you, without much success; and the familiar longing for you, for things to change back for us - became yet another bleak layer of a well kept hopelessness. For it was only the night before that I had finally seen you again.I had mentally rehearsed that scenario repeatedly for months, then locked the thought away in a dark, back cupboard of my mind, so my heart couldn't easily retrieve it to further embellish the contemplation. Somehow I must have conned myself into hoping.

* * * *

Yesterday morning I'd walked into a conference of hundreds, camouflaged beneath apparent intentionality. All the while, I was making sidelong glances at every corner of the room, to hunt you out. I could barely breathe, as though I was at some high altitude where the air was very thin. But as the hours wore on and there were still no signs of you, a heightened claustrophobia arose within, which I knew was actually despair setting in: my months of fitful imaginings had really come to nothing.

By coffee break my head was spinning and congested with too much information; I badly needed to break out into open space. I rounded a corner, eyes and mind unheeding, and suddenly you were there, your back not six feet from me. In the past I would have run to you, heart racing with joy, arms impatient to smother you in embrace. But I froze, then ran, as though I had been kicked in the stomach. My deepest disappointment with myself was how in a moment of crisis I'd turned on my cowardly heels and fled. Everything blurred; I lost orientation of where I was; sounds became muffled as though my head was underwater. All I could feel was my heart skipping beats against an ever-constricting chest, thumping so violently like it wanted to jump out of my throat. I wanted to throw up .

* * * *

I startled when they screamed my name out of the loudspeakers from the manifest hut. It was midday and the fog had finally burnt off. I found myself in a freezing hangar being fitted into a jumpsuit and harness; strange men's hands all over my body as straps were tightened and buckles snapped shut, but I didn't react. Tandem skydiving was all about being up close and personal. Eighteen of us, snuggled up like multiple peas in a pod, straddling a metal bench backwards on either side of a narrow aisle. The tiny plane climbed to 13,000 feet over the next twenty minutes. I was literally in my instructor's lap, with the dedicated cameraman I had paid for pressed against my chest. Again, I chose not to react to this proximity. There was some inane banter among the veterans; they did this a dozen times each day and it meant nothing for them to plummet into thin air. It was my first charity jump and every thousand feet climbed my instructor would show me his wrist altimeter, and check that I had not grown apoplectic. Each time I nodded and smiled brightly; I was a consummate wearer of masks.

Your face suddenly loomed unbidden into my mind and a sharp pang hit my breast. All my hackles rose: no, no, this was not the time. I breathed very shallowly, closed my eyes and thought a tiny prayer. But I didn't really know what I prayed: God help? With what? That I wouldn't die? Because I already felt dead, or wanted to be dead, so the pain would finally stop.

* * * *

I burst through some glass doors and gasped at the fresh shock of clammy autumn air. It was drizzling, and the chill was the kind that liked to creep under your skin and stay there, to make you tremble from within. I clutched at some black railings, heaving imperceptibly. Somehow I returned to my seat and perched like a corpse, skin prickling. I knew you'd seen me by now, mere rows between us, but you never engaged. When we were sent round the room you breezed past me with your gaze averted, and I too kept turning away just at the point of collision. I had a million eyes behind my head, every inch of my back on fire. Each missed encounter was an invisible body blow: I became so raw, so bruised and cut up within that had anyone touched me I would have screamed. All the while I appeared to be taking notes, making small talk. How we often coast on autopilot, and the world would never see.

I finally imploded - secretly, silently; got fed up as we dodged and danced round each other with such cruel craft. Against my better judgement I sent a text to your phone. I railed at you then, screaming from my fingertips how we could continue to play out this murderous charade, pretending that the other didn't exist in that same room. You wouldn't reply. So at the last word for the day, I stormed out.

It was raining harder outside. Under my small thin umbrella I begged God to show His hand. I made it as far as my parked car and had given up, when you texted. A coffee? Finally, six months of unbroken silence later, two small words on my mobile screen. I stared and stared at them.

You were standing there on the side of the road, and I knew your frame yards away, through the rain, through the dimness of fading afternoon light; it was the way you angled yourself in space. In a moment, there you were, inches from me. I kept my eyes on the road, blue white knuckles gripping the steering wheel. We said so little in so much, so much in so little; but we never mentioned us. No why, no how could you, no apology for cruelty and wounding. Just things. Anything. Suddenly we were outside your house.

As I finally turned to look directly at you for the first time that day, for the first time in many days, you leaned and scooped me up into your arms. I kept very still and small, breathing in the smell of you, letting you stay there for as long as you wanted to.

"So there's this elephant in the room." I finally said as you disengaged.
"What elephant?" you threw back at me.
"The one that is here right between us." I said.
"That's because I'm seeing someone else."

And then you smiled. A slightly crooked, mean little smile - through narrowed eyes, peering down at me from your great height, so I felt even smaller than I was. We locked eyes for but a second, then you jumped out of my car.

* * * *

The door of the aircraft was yanked open with an uncomforting screech, and two by two, the tandem pairs disappeared beyond its frame. It was such an odd thing to watch: one moment faces turned to look back towards us in the cabin, you note the dilated pupils behind the goggles, the half parted lips frozen in sheer terror; then in the next instant, they were gone. How swiftly we can lose those who were once so close to us we could feel the beating of their hearts. My turn was up.

My instructor shouted in my right ear to stick my feet out of the plane, lean back hard against him and to rest my head on his left shoulder. If any moment posed a disconnect, that must have been it: how I'd longed all yesterday to be close to you once again, but now I was pressing my body against a total stranger. I thought that very instant I heard a sound: it was the crack of my heart. My instructor, with perfect timing, yelled through the howling wind for me to smile then at my cameraman; he was by this time clutching the outer edges of the plane by his fingernails. I beamed. Then I was pushed and all three of us tumbled out of the plane.

It must be the weight of our heads, the heaviest part of our bodies and therefore the first to plunge. Don't we do that when we are born, follow the compulsive downward leading of our heads and come crashing into another existence, into the light and the cold? For the barest fraction of that first nanosecond I nosedived headlong into oblivion and inwardly screamed, newborn into the strangeness of free falling. Oddly, that moment also felt like death; there was an inevitability about it, and no escape; it was far too late for alternatives.

I heard nothing. Despite the explosion of the updraft hitting me full in the face and against my body, in my head I heard an unearthly silence. I think my heart must have stopped, or at least, I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel anything; I was numb and felt no rush of life blood. Nor any fear; I had no thoughts whatsoever. My mind must have been too strained to cope with this unknown sensation of interminable dropping, the spinning ground beneath me very recognisable and very real. The pre-jump teacher told us that there was nothing to fear because it was just air, and air couldn't hurt us. As one slices sharply and relentlessly through that air though, it was clear that what could hurt us was the ground below; it was hungry for us to meet it violently, and I was hurtling at a hundred and twenty miles per hour towards it. But as things stood, I'd already been so deeply hurt by all that you'd said and done to me, I merely spun helplessly round and round, spreadeagled like a huge autumn leaf, buffeted hither and thither as the wind took me. I no longer cared if I would hit that ground hard, or whether the impact could shatter me into any more broken pieces than I already was. Afterwards I was told that I fell 8,000 feet in a mere forty-five seconds. I had no concept of time passing.

Suddenly my cameraman, whom I'd been waving mechanically at, peeled away and fell even faster towards earth. I realised that my instructor had tapped me hard twice on my shoulder, and the chute had broken loose. I felt a sharp jolt and was jerked roughly upwards. From that moment it was though we'd just stepped into another room right there in the middle of the sky. All at once, I saw, I heard, I felt. I could think again. And you came at me then in full force, slammed into me as gale and cloud and cold and noise. The thought of you - the way you'd loved me, then left me; your broken promises and many betrayals; the long, unexplained silences; the momentary reunions and repeated abandonments - you assaulted with all that and knocked the wind out of me there in my mid-flight, as you did back on the ground the night before. I crumpled like a ragdoll, and was grateful that the parachute held me upright and disguised my fallenness.

Without any warning, the sun suddenly burst forth, its rays slashing the dull sky like a sword through a taut swathe of steel grey silk. Almost immediately every acre of dung brown land below took on the burnished golds, berry reds and deep pine greens of the season; earth came alive like an animated patchwork quilt.

My instructor was pointing out landmarks to me, telling me to pull on the chords of the chute to turn it to the left or to the right. I was still descending at a great speed from 5,000 feet, and ground zero was yet a long way off. But I became aware that my feet were treading fluffy little clouds at times. The rush of the air had somehow softened in the sun, so instead of a rude slap on my cheeks it was now a gentle caress. Every manoeuvre picked up speed again and was still petrifying, but I felt somehow - held. From deep within grew a surprising determination not to show any fear.

"I've come all this way, Sky, I'm not going to let you get the better of me," I said wordlessly to all that was around me.

For the rest of the descent I kept my eyes wide open, not once shutting them to any encroaching horror, for I knew it was waiting there to pounce on me and seize me. No. I'd had enough of shutting my eyes from what could inflict pain; I wasn't going to run from that confrontation any more. Something in me had determined, in that state of weird suspension, that I would somehow find it in me to fight for what I wanted, for what I loved, no matter how hard, how hopeless, or how scary. I think from that point in time, I began to fly. My instructor seemed to instinctively sense a change in my body language, so guided us back in wide scythe-like arcs, traversing sometimes at breakneck speed in sharp dips, then easing out into complete stillness, hovering like a hawk toying with the thermals. Everything below seemed so still, and so clear.

The drop zone appeared almost too soon. Having watched the jumpers before me from the ground but a little while ago, I knew that I too would reappear with an element of surprise. One moment folks would be peering at nothing but thick cloud layers; then I would cascade into sight, a tiny pink dot twirling and zigzagging intently towards them, growing ever larger in my descent. I felt I was glowing in the mid-afternoon sunshine as I pirouetted down like a shiny propeller seed.

About a hundred feet from the bottom my instructor urged me to lift my legs up high. Then his feet touched down and a second after, my own feet landed. I was standing up, and everything around me stopped moving. I heard distant applause and laughter from the spectating crowd, and my cameraman came at me to extract more smiling and waving, while my instructor clapped me heartily on my back in congratulation. I became aware that all about me my fellow jumpers had also landed, and the field was littered with spreads of multicoloured parachutes, now lifeless and unspectacular ghosts on the hard, cold ground.

It was all over in a matter of half an hour, but felt as though an eternity had passed, and somewhere up there in the stratosphere I had been robbed of time and thought and emotions. Now standing still in space again, my whole body tingled and my feet barely touched terra firma ; I seemed to skim along the grass as I headed back towards the cold hangar to remove my hired gear. It would be another hour before my mind would catch up with what my body had just done. And it would be many more hours after that when my feelings could finally attached themselves to my head and body. By then it was midnight: as I lay in the soft darkness of my own warm bed, I finally erupted in an uncontrollable fit of giggles. Deep inside me I knew I was weeping and weeping, but the laughter wouldn't allow the brain to release any tears.

My last thought as I drifted off to a deep and exhausted sleep, was this: What's a skyscraper after 13,000 feet? I was a tiny bit scared of myself then. What reckless thing might I do next, just to keep all this pain at bay? I don't think I spared a thought for you at all that night.