Falling (Out the Sky)
You know sometimes when you’re about to fall asleep, and suddenly you dream of falling, uncontrollably, for some time and its disorientating, it’s unnerving and it jolts you awake?
Have you ever enjoyed that feeling?
When we were gathered waiting on the ground before our skydive, I felt sick. The anticipation was eating away at me and I just wanted to shut myself in the bathroom. The instructor who gave us a safety briefing told us if we panicked and grabbed our instructor in the air, we could die. He told us if we didn’t lift our knees when told to do so before landing, we could break our legs.
Before I got in that plane, I felt restless, disorientated with fear, terrified. Nothing felt right.
Then- when I got in the plane, suddenly I focused. An eerily still kind of focus that sweeps over me sometimes, when I’m under a lot of pressure, when I’m truly terrified… and I love it, (actually I chase it), because in that moment, everything around me is rushing and loud and dangerous, adrenalin has grabbed me by the shoulders, and it’s shaking me, trying to rile me up… but I feel able to stare it in the face and let it know I don’t care and whatever the situation- I jump…
It’s the most liberating feeling ever.
The plane door opened, I knew the propellers were buzzing, and the instructors were shouting out orders, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I looked straight down, to a patchwork quilt of fields 15,000 feet below, and fell into the vacuum of sky before me.
I hear that a lot of people enjoy the serene floating by parachute down to land, at the end, but my favourite part was the free fall. Where time means nothing and you hear nothing and you weigh nothing and you are just falling, the sky stinging in your eyes and your mouth and rattling your skin and you know if something fucks up you could die but you don’t care, because its the closest feeling to flying, and also the closest feeling to dying and thats when you feel most alive.
I would do it again in a (happily terrified) heartbeat.
Photos by HIBALDSTOW SKYDIVE official photographer.
Beyond 