jump

I dream of the jump.

I am suspended - suspended between sky and water, between land and air, between death and life.

I

j      m   e
   u     p     d.

I can’t even remember the act, itself, but i do remember the edge - a keen awareness of its definition, its contours, its cracks, the softness of earth beneath my bare feet. I couldn’t see the bottom. I couldn’t let myself see the bottom - at the bottom is where my fears lay. But i could see the edge, and I focused on the edge until that too faded away and I was above the edge, above the bottom, above everything but myself. No, I was fully in myself.

My neck was rig
                           id with the pressure

of the

i
n
v
i
s
i
b
l
e

sky on my chest;
                my inability to breathe.
                                      I was holding in all life - life was             
                                                         suspended

I was full, I was


waiting...

My life was suspended, but time was not.

I
came
down

with a smash, with a splash, with weight I had forgotten I owned.

I came down in water and spit and blood and sting and the strange pleasure of having hovered over my fears - of having been suspended in a time and place where they could not reach me - where no one could reach me - no one but myself.

I swam back to the cliff, climbed up the rocks,
and I jumped again.