Listen: this is how it works. You’re on a rocky,
footstomped-hardened, dirt incline a thousand or so
feet up a mountain. A deflated jellyfish of a
parachute streams up the slope behind you, tentacles
benignly latched to your shoulders. The pilot stands
between you and the chute, strapped to both, his back
facing yours; he will jog backwards until the last
possible moment. You’re told to “run and don’t stop”
or else you’ll be a wrecked Evil Kinevel in uncharted
woods below. Wide-eyed you look around, deaf to the
endlessly tumbling children on the ridge above. At
some indefinable point in the future you will be
gliding with nothing below.

So you run, pounding it, feeling nothing. The
parachute takes a great puff and billows out, its
first breath born of your determined, blind pulling
and you are missing this, the poetry of the opening
chute, flowering and rippling upwards, a golem too
impossibly cumbersome to be so smoothly sparked to
life by you until

Silence. Your foot takes its first step into empty
air. You’re flying.