Free Fall

I was once given the opportunity to taste a life I had never known before, experience a place and routine so foreign to my own as to be unrecognizable. And it was beautiful. I chased through damp fields in the full moon, prowled old graveyards deep at night, drank with good friends around a roaring campfire, and confessed deep and longing secrets on winding dusty roads.

And then it was gone. As quickly as it came.

I returned to my normal routine in a sudden daze of normality. The week quickly faded into the long and empty past that stretches out over the years behind you. I look back at it now, and I know that I miss it dearly: what it was, what it could have been, what it might still be. But I also know that it's gone.

You take too many turns, and eventually you're somewhere else. Another time, another place, and where you came from, you simply just can't get back to. It's gone.

I just recently took a blind leap off the side of a mountain. I closed my eyes, spread my wings, and with a great confident smile, hurled myself over the edge backwards. I didn't care too much where I landed, I just hoped it would somehow be better. Is it? I don't know. I hope I'm still just in free fall.

In free fall, everything is a blur. It all goes whistling past, a dense flood of information, people, places, things, emotions. I wish I could say it's a pleasant sensation, but everything is so different, it's impossible to latch on to anything and slow the descent. Instead of gracefully slowing, or searching for a target, I feel as though I'm simply tumbling about, pointing a different direction at any given moment in time. I've got all the right equipment to land, but it definitely isn't going to be a graceful landing, and I simply can't tell what it looks like at my destination.

I wish I could say it'll be better, but it's so easy to remember where I just came from, that remarkably mundane life I just left from, and remember that it wasn't all that mundane after all. Those crowded nights exploring the bright city streets, beautiful days spent climbing mountains, resting in the tangled limbs of a lover while drops fall from the heavens, empty weeks spent casually creating things in the ambient company of someone that understands, the crowded halls where everyone knows you'll help them, even though you've never met them. So many things.

*sigh*

Free Fall.

I can't possibly know where I'll land yet, all I can hope is the wind doesn't tear me apart before I get there.