Freefall

I jumped.

The sound was deafening, much different compared to the bassy rumble from the belly of the plane. Out here, the sound was rushing, it was a beating of the wind against my body, and I couldn’t so much feel it at first, only hear it. My ears were overpowered by the deafening sound. I couldn’t comprehend the power of the absolute rushing, beating, rumbling sound of the wind as it whipped by. Somehow, the sound wasn’t terrifying, it was soothing

At first, my limbs sprawled all over the place as I tried my hardest to make sense of my body. Air was beating against me, using all of its power to try and make me collapse into a tumbling ball of humanity, but I summoned all of my strength and prevailed. As if I were a kite suddenly thrust into the bright blue sky over a windy beach, my arms and legs snapped out, and I changed from a stumbling amateur to a professional, a legionnaire of the sky.

This, of course, happened in only an instant, a sudden flash of time. By the time I was falling in the correct position, the plane had just barely moved past me. I turned my head to the side, fighting against the inevitable power of the wind, to watch as the glimmering metal beast of the skies moved away. It was so controlled compared to me. The plane was steady, strong, and on a specific flight plan. I, well I was just a tiny speck of life allowing itself to fall as far and as fast as it could. I had no plan, no strength, and no steadiness. I really didn’t have any control.

Finally, I allowed myself to gaze at the curving world below me. This high up, you can see the curve of the earth so well that it is daunting. We’re always told that the planet is a sphere, but until you see it like I saw it then, you really have no perception. Below me the world sprawled in greens and blues; farms far below as it were, their quilted patch-work design all too cliché yet all too real. I could see faint lines of gray; roads; and a splotch of blue that was a pond. It was so bright and beautiful far up here, the sun shining down and spreading light over everything. I closed my eyes into a long blink and let my eyes wrap around the view. No matter how often I jumped, it was always this breath-taking.

As I fell, I let my mind wander, as I often do. I thought back to my first jump, a shallow dive with another man holding me. They don’t trust you the first few times you jump, they make you latch on to another person and they do all the hard work while you play ‘tourist of the sky.’ I remember just a few moments into the jump how alone I felt, even with Joe Shmoe literally right on top of me. And I realized, then, that this was the first time in my life I had ever been able to just stop and think. It was just my luck, of course, to have to jump out of an airplane and fall through the sky to get some me-time, but everyone has their special place, and, well, up there was mine.

Coming back to reality, I scolded myself for wasting time. I only had a small window of this fall to think to myself, and I was wasting it looking back on other jumps. I closed my eyes for another long blink, held my arms steady against the rushing wind, and remembered the first time I met Dahlia.



The hustle-bustle of activity shrouded around me as I sat, alone, at the table. The fake wood-grain that swirled across the table mesmerized me as I took another bite of my turkey and cheese sandwich. Being in college, ‘dorm food’ was my staple, and eating alone in the cafeteria my hobby. Next to my tray was a diet coke with a splash or so of rum mixed in. It just tasted better that way. I was thoroughly enthralled with my sandwich (I absolutely loved turkey and cheese sandwiches) to even notice as she made her way over towards me. When she sat down, a wave of some perfume washed over me and shocked me back into reality. I looked at her inquisitively, and she only smiled. She had reddish-brown hair, cut short and wild, and a smile that could tame wild bears. Most importantly, she too appeared to be getting ready to eat a turkey and cheese sandwich. She told me her name, Dahlia, an exotic name I had never heard before. My name, I said, was much more boring. She only laughed.

Thinking back, I can remember that laugh so clearly, it’s almost as though I have a permanent recording of her in my head. I could be cliché and say it’s the laugh of a thousand nightingales, but it more resembled a hyena on helium. Of course, I got to hear her laugh like that for decades, what with us finding each other and really never being able to lose one another again. We had latched on almost immediately, and right after I got my B.A., I asked her to marry me. We moved to Washington, went to grad school, and proceeded to live the most enviable life ever (or so I thought).

***

There was a perpetual smile on my face, I knew it, but it’s not like there was anyone else there to see it. There was just me, the wind, and the earth some huge distance below me. I felt the straps of my goggles and my parachute bag flapping violently against my body. They didn’t sting, or if they did I was far too preoccupied to notice. Instead, they just added to the ambiance as I glided softly towards the world below me.

***

Our first child was named Trevor, after his father, and he was a hell of a screamer. He was an inquisitive kid, taking an interest in everything from computers to flowers, and spent every minute of every day contemplating the world in any way he could. He was sharp too. He climbed into my lap once, his inquisitive face staring up at mine. He asked me why the sky was blue. I set my wine down and told him that the sky was blue because of the color of water on earth. He looked right back up at me and said, no, the sky is blue because the atmosphere bounced all the other colors of light away but blue. He corrected me! Ten years old, I said, and already much more intelligent than his old man. We had the best times, going out to eat, watching fireworks on the Forth of July, or playing video games in the basement in the winter. I only wished I could have taken him up there, just once, so he could fall with his dad and experience what life was really like at the edge of the atmosphere.

***

Wetness splashed against one of the lenses of my goggles, and I did my best to shake it away. Because it was inside the goggle, and I was falling through the air at a ridiculous rate of speed, I couldn’t exactly wipe it away. Instead, I had to look at it the rest of the way down. It tore me apart.

***

Watching the news that day was terrible. Dahlia and I were sitting on our plush couch, half sunk in, with a fire going and the TV on, the volume low. An empty glass, droplets of scotch clinging to the bottom, sat solemnly on the end table next to me. It was snowing outside, and when the story came on, the story we already knew, we fell again into tears. The lady telling our story, telling how a whole family plus the son of another family was brutally murdered by a deranged father, it was horrifying to hear it again. Trevor had asked to stay the night with his friend, and we had said yes, damning him away. We sat, huddled on the couch, crying in each other’s arms, for what felt like weeks. But Dahlia was pregnant, and the daughter she gave birth to saved our lives.

If there was anyone in the world who came as close to the beauty and wonder that is Dahlia, it was our daughter Sheila. She was the smartest girl in the world, and spunky too. She had a sass about her that I had never experienced before, but she also had the deepest sense of love and understanding. If Trevor was the one who corrected me on factual information, it was Sheila who corrected me on everything else. Dahlia and I got so involved with raising this new child, and we were so enthralled by her personality and sense of adventure, we began to let Trevor settle into the past. We never forgot him, of course, but it was best for all of us to move on eventually.

Sheila was five when we had Jet, and she spent just much time as we did caring for him. Once, in the living room, we were all settled in and watching a movie. Sheila was seven, and Jet two. The movie was a little risqué, and in the middle Sheila randomly blurted out how inappropriate it was for Jet to be watching it. She was so involved that sometimes I wondered if she had been a better father than I. Maybe she actually was.

***

The world was getting closer now, the curvature was starting to go away and things were beginning to be clearer. I knew a had a limited time to think, and this was all very wonderful for me to think about up there, so I returned as quickly as I could to the world of my past.

***

It was a hot summer day and I was out working in the yard while Dahlia played cards inside with some of her friends. As I worked on a particular patch of hydrangeas, sweat trickling down my face, I heard a loud banging sound, like metal on wood. It sounded like hammering, so I paid it no mind; the neighbors were always doing work on their houses. The afternoon meandered on, as afternoons often do, and in the early evening I decided to call it a day and head inside to rest. I retrieved a frosty beer from the fridge and went about looking for the kids. When I couldn’t find them in the house, I headed out back to see if they were romping about in the backyard. When I stepped out onto the brick patio, I realized that the construction noises weren’t coming from the neighbors, but from one of my own trees. The kids had decided they wanted a tree house, and had set to building one.

For a couple of kids, they had done an amazing job, and I felt proud as I watched them scramble about putting pieces of wood randomly about. They were using my tools and wood from the shed, and had fashioned quite the little fort over the course of the day. They laughed when they saw me and invited me up, so I reluctantly tested their fort out. The floor fell through and I went crashing to the ground amidst the giggles of my children. I broke my arm from the fall (they had decided that a super-high tree fort was the best plan), but as soon as I was healed I helped them rebuild it. It was moments like this, where they came together and built a fort in an afternoon, which always kept Dahlia and I on our toes.

***

Sheila moved out for college right after she finished high school. She had gotten a full ride to an amazing school on the east coast, and we sung her praises every day of the week. It was intensely difficult to watch her drift away, to watch her plane rise into the air, to know that we would see less and less of her and that she would never really live at home again. Dahlia and I were both immensely proud of her, and happy for her achievements, and we did what we do best and that was to move right along. Jet was still at home, thirteen and a raging pubescent young man, and we thanked the world for something else still to be going on at home.

***

When Jet was seventeen we got a letter in the mail for Sheila’s wedding. We had known it was coming, and were pleased to receive it, short notice or no. Sheila was rushing into marriage, I knew that much, but I didn’t really understand why. She did rush into a lot of things; that was true about her. Maybe she just lived at a fast pace, and needed everything to happen quickly and efficiently to try and keep up. As apprehensive as I was, I did my best to be happy for her.

The wedding was beautiful and wonderful. As I wandered about the reception, set in a huge oak-walled room lined with orchids of every shape and size, I began to reminisce about my own wedding. Chardonnay in hand, I wistfully let my mind drift through the years to that wonderful, white day. I was interrupted by a beautiful woman, in a deep blue satin gown, who wanted to dance with me. As I held her in the romantically lit room, the soft wedding music playing for hours, Dahlia and I experienced one of the most romantic moments we had in a very long time. I later expressed to Sheila how proud I was of her and how happy I was for her, and I really was both. Her husband was a sharp young man from upstate New York who called me ‘Sir’ and always expressed interest in my work. I replied that I was just a lowly writer but he bounced back, telling me he had read my work even before he had met Sheila and loved it.

***

More splashes of water banked against my goggles as I sped towards the earth. The time was coming close for me to pull my chute cord, but I felt like I wasn’t quite ready. There was still much of my past to rediscover, and I moved on through the years like my body sailed through the air.

***

Jet turned eighteen and joined the army almost right away. Dahlia and I supported him fully in whatever venture he chose to pursue, and he had said the army held adventures he had always wanted to have. Jet was always an adventuresome kid, and I admired that about him. I always wrote about adventures safely hidden in a chair at a typewriter (later a leather swivel and a computer, then finally my bed and a laptop), but he had experienced many of them first-hand. I loved him more than life itself, and he knew it, and he returned that love ten-fold.

Jet wrote us an email every month while he was at boot camp and during his training, and Dahlia and I always made a ritual of sitting at our computer and reading his letters aloud. Coupled with the numerous informal memos from our now successful daughter, we always had much reading to do when we connected to the internet.

The glare of the computer screen lit my glasses as I read the emails, either to myself or for Dahlia, and I remember the taste of expensive hazelnut coffee mixed with Kahlua on my tongue as I read this particular one. In the short and to-the-point way that Jet wrote all of his emails, he announced that he had met the woman of his dreams and was going to marry her. He told us, very matter of fact, that he would be living his life in southern Russia, and that he would miss us but it was what he wanted. Dahlia, her hand on the chair back and her other folded across her stomach, laughed to herself and shook her head. I looked up at the woman I loved, placed my hand on the back of her neck, and kissed her. We were officially alone.

***

I reached for the chute cord, but didn’t pull it yet. Something was still left to be thought about. It had been years since my last jump, years since I had been able to come up here to think, and I was going to savor every minute of it. I still had plenty of time.

***

Dahlia and I moved out of the house and bought a small condo near Lake Tahoe. We were getting old and we didn’t really need much space anymore, except when the grandkids came. Sheila had two children, Jet five, and when they came the condo would explode back into the chaotic world it had been when the kids were still at home. But those visits were short and few and far between, so Dahlia and I had most of the time to ourselves. We spent the days reading and talking, watching movies and the sunset, sharing drinks on the beach, and whatever really came to mind. She had retired a few years before and I was still writing but not nearly as much. We were able to enjoy the finer things in our later years, and we would still snuggle and talk about the old days late into the night as we had twenty years before.

***

Dressed in black, the harsh wind blowing our clothes and hair away, the world seemed to cry at the funeral. It was cold, rainy, and dismal. I couldn’t even cry. Even as Sheila and Jet held me and sobbed into my jacket much as they had as children, I couldn’t bring myself to. It was just too much for an old man to bear. The priest finished his eulogy and the casket, the deep brown wood reminding me of her hair, was lowered; half of my life moving into the unforgiving earth.

She was sixty-two years young when she got cancer and sixty-four when she left me in this world all alone. I had lost so much over my life, but nothing came even close to losing the one person who completed me. Dahlia’s death was the hardest thing for me to endure, as it felt like an entire half of me had been torn away. I had never cried so much as I did when she left, I had never felt so alone, and I had never drank so much as then..

The condo was always dark and empty feeling, and I couldn’t bear to live there very long. I moved out only six months after she died and bought a motor home instead. I roamed across the country. ‘Seeing the sights’ is what I told myself I was doing, but in reality I was simply searching for somewhere I could call home. I never found that place. Sheila and Jet were so supportive the whole time, always offering to take care of me. Part of me wanted to go live with or near Sheila so she could, but I didn’t want to be a burden so I never did. They eventually stopped calling me so much, and almost never came to see me. I knew they were busy, but I was dying of heartbreak and I didn’t understand why they couldn’t see that. I had to find somewhere to go. I wasn’t ancient, but I was getting old. I never felt more alone than I did during those dark days. It was only a few weeks ago I moved into the place I was at now, and only a few days ago when I decided I would go for one last freefall before I settled down somewhere to die.

***

The time had come for me to pull the chute cord, and I suddenly wondered how much I really wanted to. I had nothing really left to live for, nothing left at all but the sadness that accompanied me and the impending death that I had actually began to long for. As I fell, the wind roaring by my face, the pools of tears settled in my goggles, and the world quickly coming closer, I contemplated just letting my body smash into the ground and putting myself out of my misery. I realized, then, that al this grandness I saw, all the love and glory, all the wonderful times; it was all shrouded by death and darkness. No matter how hard I thought about the wonderful and fabulous times my life has held, the nasty times kept slipping in. What did I have left but a black veil over my own eyes, filtering my vision of the world?

I only had the briefest of moments to decide. If I chose to live, I needed to make that choice fast enough that I actually could. My chute needed time to set, and pulling it too late would really counter any revelation for life I would have. I wanted nothing more than to fall to my death, then to feel the ground turn me into a thin mist that could drift to heaven and to my family. My heart raced as my mind thoroughly investigated the idea.

Life? Or death?

The world came crashing towards me, faster and faster it seemed, as I tried to decide my own fate. I thought back on the death in my life, looked back at everything. I looked back up to the sky, quickly becoming once again untouchable, and saw all of my past lingering there like a constant reminder of who I was and what I had faced. My heart was racing in my chest; my breathing was quick, uneven. I couldn’t decide what to do. I couldn’t make a decision like that.

As if by some outer force that was pushing me, I reached for the chute cord without really thinking and pulled it. There was a deafening thud and crack as the massive cloth life-saver flung out of my pack and snapped into the air, grabbing it and jerking me to a slow fall. It rattled my bones and my flesh, the intense pull of the chute, and it shook me into a consciousness I hadn’t felt in some time. As I lazily drifted back to the real world, I had the very revelation I was looking for. I would move near Sheila, somewhere on the east coast, and I would get some meaningless job doing something I enjoyed. Maybe I would join some bingo club or something, and finish writing the rest of my own story before ending it at some ridiculous old age. Dahlia, Jet, Sheila, and Trevor—they would all want me to live on, and so I would, somehow. I had more pain than I could possibly know how to deal with, and yet I felt I had to try and live on.

All at once I crashed to the hard surface and landed in a heap. I hadn’t been paying attention and I paid for it with pain. That was a bad landing if there ever was one. Even more so, I had landed on some obscure farm road, the asphalt of which had bit at my skin and crushed my bones. I felt my leg break, the bone inside snapping, and I winced in pain. I looked down to it; saw the bone sticking out of my skin, sinewy and red. I was crumpled, hurt, and confused, but I had a smile on my face for the first time in quite a while. In the distance, I could see the jump crew running towards me, yelling for me not to move. I motioned back, and moved to untangle myself from the parachute, and my mess of a life.