And away we went.
I would never have thought I would be so calm. I climbed onto the small plane with twenty other people. We sat two by two on narrow benches with the instructors strapped onto our backs. My instructor put clear goggles on my eyes and pulled it tight. We quickly climbed up to ten thousand feet. It was so windy with the door of the plane open.
I was the first to go since I was sitting closest to the open door. My instructor asked if I was ready. I gave him a thumbs-up.
Looking down at the ground below us, everything was so small, like a Lego set. I tucked my body into a ball, the jumping position, and rolled into thin air.
I spread my arms and legs out as instructed. So this was what it felt like to fly like a bird. It was not fast at all. We were floating in the air, not falling like a stone out of the sky as I’d envisioned it.
The air resistance was pushing us up. I could see the skin on my arms flapping around like a sail. I was in the air with nothing around me except endless sky, amazing. But not scary at all. Maybe it was because I had a highly trained skydiving instructor strapped to my back. I was not alone flying in the empty sky.
We were floating for less than a minute before my guide opened the parachute. We shot up into the sky. With the parachute open, we were falling even slower than before.
So that was it? It was so anticlimactic. All that time I had been thinking it would be so scary, thrilling, and the ultimate rush. Now that I’d done it, it was not exciting at all. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever done, but I just thought it would be way more spine tingling.
I was still glad I’d done it. I could scratch it off my bucket list now. It was kind of a letdown, though. Maybe it was like most things in life: when you put too much expectations into it, you were most likely disappointed in the end because the bar was set too high.
Nothing like my unexpected chance encounter that had taken over my world from ten thousand miles away. I wondered what Evon was doing right now.
From Thousand-Year-Old Dream: The One
Rebecca Eyre 