The golden rays of the sun showered into the vast muscles of mountains, steadily replacing the black shadows with a warm blanket of gold. I looked from the smoky glass on the plane as the Earth suddenly sprang to life. “It’s time,” said the pilot with a commanding voice. And I lifted up from my seat. My back was stone. “You ready, bro?” said the guide, I shook my head nervously. “You don’t look so!” I shook my head with determination sparkling from my eyes.

The door slid open and wind flood flooded the plane. I looked down at the land with a wintry air against my face, gripping the railings with my weak hands. As my wrist went weak I rushed down from the plane, the heavy air was closing in on me. I was consumed with the feeling of desolate hopelessness and loneliness. My entire body was throbbing uncontrollably. My sight was blurring and a red mist appeared later, there was a whirring noise in my ears. 

My entire life came flashing back as panic fluttered in the cave of my chest. It felt like drowning in water, except the breathing was easy. There I was whirling down with the wind with no sense of time and place. Disoriented, I pressed my parachute button, but it didn’t open. I could see the blue sky and the puffs of green and red turning round and round. My stomach churned. I trembled and shivered on the cold waters.

The earth pulled me down rapidly and with a sudden splash, I plunged into the water. At first, there was a numb feeling then a sharp pain radiating through my back. Water tugged around me and pulled me by the chest. My lungs were bursting. My eyes were sore. My entire body felt lazy, almost comfortable at the impending doom. I could feel water thrusting into me and myself into it. Blackness came over my eyes until I was suddenly jerked up by a rope tied to my leg. When I was flung by the legs into the land, I sprawled on the floor, water and blood oozed out of my eyes and ears, or so my friends told me later.

The feeling of insignificance and helplessness, of being a tiny wisp in a massive world, still haunts me day and night. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, fighting the blanket that I was wrapped in. That deep pulsing in my throat, that unendurable oppression of the lungs, the rigidity of the limbs and that empty feeling in the hollow of my heart ensure that I’m never going to jump from the sky again.