What it Means to Jump

For as long as I can remember, I have had the urge to jump off a building. And not from the top of the corner grocery, or the coffee shop, or the 7-11. From a skyscraper, a high-rise. Not from a building, from a building.

Not out of despair or depression, mind you. In fact, it is the constant whispers that I am mortal that hold me back from doing it. They're strong things, and I can't even imagine really following through on the crazy notion of flinging myself from the 40th story. When I approach that balcony the thoughts of the ravenous grip of gravity and being head over heels flood my brain. Then the sickening crack, the sudden kick of the ground, and then the black bloody nothing that I'm sure my ignorant mind substitutes for the unknown feeling of death.

And so I stand there, wind in my ears, and crane my neck down to watch the world beneath: the people scurrying by and the glittering lights that embroider the city in the night. I can't hear what everybody's saying from up there, but I can watch and think. In many ways, my life is one spent on that balcony, upon my tower looking over a domain that, from the ground, is vast and the property of all who live inside it. But from my perch, it's my little kingdom to rule over, to observe and grasp and simply bask in. In the place of jumping off the tower and breaking my neck on the ashy ground below.

But the urge is still there: the crawling feeling of lightness and the strange dizzy displacement of what feels like my soul, flung off over the railing and away into the sky. Sometimes it makes me feel a little sick, but I can't move and I'll be standing by that steep drop enraptured by it. Knowing that I'm in my right mind because if I wasn't I'd be over the rail and far away.

In my waking hours, that is.

I have many vivid dreams, and I remember them consistently. Sometimes they're lesser dreams, where I'm accosted by familiar faces that stare out of ink and lighted screens and out from between words on a page. Those are recycled bits of small fancies, voices that go and steal names from somebody else to use. But then there are big dreams, which are never whimsical and never populated by fantastic characters or fictional heroes. In lesser dreams, it is easy for me to deduce that I am dreaming. In big dreams, even if I've had them a million times before, they are always new to me.

I'm always completely alone in the big dreams even if there are other 'people' present. There are never any words spoken to me; there doesn't need to be. The most terrible of them is The Flood, an infinite mass of crushing gray water that trickles slow as the rain grows and then smashes everything in it's path. The vision climaxes. Usually I die, mind pushing the iron darkness, innocent of what death tastes like. On the rare occasion I survive, I'll be clinging to jetsam and the corpses. I'll be lucky if it's long before the seagulls swarm.

But that's the most tragic of Big Dreams, and unrelated.

In my sleep I sometimes find myself standing on my grandmother's balcony at her high rise apartment in Miami, just as the sun sets. I can never recall what I'm wearing-- sometimes just a slip, sometimes just a shirt or just pants. Sometimes nothing. But regardless of circumstance, I climb upon the wide concrete rail before I know what I'm doing. And in that moment I have an epiphany of almost religious significance.

I am immortal.

And as if I was simply stepping into a pool, my balance tips down and I tumble head over heels until I'm falling feet-first with that sickening sensation served by roller coasters: as if I left my guts twenty feet above me. The saner part of me yells and screams that I'm finished but, whatever jar it's in, it doesn't let out noise. The wind rushes past my ears, and I feel so pleasantly cool as the cloth of my slip or pants or shirt flutters, if I'm wearing it at all.

And then something coils in my legs, as if they're made of cork and steel springs. I've landed on top of the parking garage, but my bones aren't shattering and there isn't any pain. And then, as if releasing the tension, I jump.

I'm not sure if that's what it means to jump, for my eyes open with delight as I go sailing up the way I came and forward into the dusky light, lifting to the sky. And the light is golden, falling in a curtain from a sky that has no more horizon, the whistling of the breeze becoming metallic and sweet like brass bells. My heart leaps along with the rest of me, and I feel an overpowering joy. I don't understand why it makes me so happy. It's just part of the dream that comes up. It's joyful.

As soon as I wake up I realize I've had the damn dream again and almost beg for the trivial distractions or the vaguely-prophetic dreams I never remember until I get that weird sense of deja-vu. I wake up and pull the covers over me angrily and grumble about having the blasted jumping off a building dream.

Because when I wake up, I'm mortal again. And that really annoys me.

You can imagine my surprise when I stood one day before my grandmother's balcony in the summer when my father walked out to stand with me.

He hates heights. Not closed heights-- with glass he does not even care. But open heights are his secret weakness, mother told me years and years ago. He is a man with a serious face and a tight knowing frown: his stature taller than he really is. He has this technique that casts you down to the dirt and suddenly he's as big as a raging dragon. His eyes are sharp and stolen from a panther: they brighten in anger when his voice quiets dangerously, suddenly able to do all of his yelling for him. He bears his battle wounds with pride and is not afraid to limp his way wherever he goes, through whatever pain I know he suffers.

He has also never said he loves me. Or my mother. Or my sister. He is a master of clever words, but does not blather on. Silence from him is like conversation from most people. And he has no babble to waste on matters of the heart that he knows are readily apparent and need no feeble assurance.

I would say I don't know why mom married him at all. But I do know why, and even though it's weird to think about she couldn't have made a better choice. Control freak he is, he is a commodity: a relic from some fantastic story that's a one in a million in this real world. Mother married the black knight from the fairy tales, a Seelie prince, the mysterious enchanter who lives at the end of the world. The one who would journey by the sword and strength of will to do whatever he needed to see his family safe and whole. Thank goodness, even if he does lack a little human empathy in the end.

My father hated heights as his only secret weakness. Fireproof, yes. Bulletproof, yes. But not immune to heights. It took him maybe twenty minutes to speak at all, and it was I who asked him first about the balcony.

He scoffed at me and told me that he never has dreaded heights and it was foolish to be afraid of such things.

But, he said, he'd feel the urge to jump off into where nobody could stop him.

I was baffled at the time. My father is imperious, ruling over our house with the fist of a king. One of those immortal big guys, a fae knight from beyond the sidhe. And he, too, felt what it would be like to step off of the highest tower: to fall or to fly. And he feared it just as much as I did.

In a few words, he was mortal.

I shouldn't have been so surprised. He is a man, after all.

It wasn't just my delusion. Jumping was a very real thing. And hearing him, champion of his folk, declare his one fear where he seemed so steadfast in all other things, changed what it meant to jump.

He knows every day of his life he'll be upon his balcony, looking down upon his kingdom below. But one day, after so long of resisting, he will jump. He will look up to the sky and take a mighty leap and be off over the edge, into the dizzying spiral below. And in that one moment, he will feel so alive, the final culmination of everything he has done and said and been.

And he will fall from his tower to the ground below and it will all be over.

Or it will be like the big dream and he will truly be invincible, springing up to the lights and the stars: one and at peace with his kingdom. Not gone, never cast upon the ground. Merely marching across his air, far away over the horizon into the sky that has no end.

No one really knows.

And it will happen to me someday. And everybody I love. And everybody I hate. And everybody in between, into people I have never met and will never see even from afar in my time on this balcony.

But I'm not sad. Because I can't understand now, and I won't understand until it's finally time. But I won't seek it, won't try to replace that bloody crushing cold with something more real. And because I am mortal, my fear keeps me safe, a fear that even the mightiest are not ashamed to harbor.

While I live, I will never know what it means to jump.