Weeeeeeeee!

The human brain — or my human brain, anyway — is an odd thing. Let’s say you’re someone overcoming a traumatic experience. Let’s say that traumatic experience involved watching someone you loved fall to her death from a great height. Would skydiving be something you’d be inclined to do three months after the tragic event? Probably not. Except if you’re me.

When my friend invited me, I emailed back within 30 seconds with the word “weeeee!” At no point in the intervening weeks did I have second thoughts. Strange, eh?

Skydiving Day ended up being the first really, truly, wholly good day I’ve had since…. well, since February 21, the day before the accident.

It was a perfect Prairie day: impossibly blue sky, lush green fields, cotton-ball clouds. It was the first sunny day after two straight weeks of driving rain. Plus, I was spending it with three of my favourite people on the planet (you know who you are).

I was the first to go. The aircraft was so tiny I literally had to spoon with the tandem instructor, Hutch. Hutch is exactly what you’d picture a guy named Hutch to be like.

There were two other solo jumpers crammed in the plane as well. Mercifully, they blocked the view out the window most of the way up, though I was able to catch occasional glimpses of farm fields stretching towards mountains. I felt really sick to my stomach, and worried what would happen if I needed to vomit.

“This one’s for you,” I mouthed to my dead friend as we hit 8,000 feet and Hutch did his final safety checks. My dead friend would have been so, so jazzed if she knew I was doing this. Maybe she did know…

The solo jumper closest to me, a middle-aged Quebecois man, gives me a fist bump and leaps out the door into the roaring sky. And then his friend goes. And then it’s my turn.

Hutch scoots to the window, and I follow, like I was trained to do. I inch my butt to the very, very edge and carefully place my feet on tiny step below, on top of the plane’s landing gear. I stand on the step, barely bigger than my feet side-by-side, and the sky is beneath me. I hold my harness and tilt my pelvis outward. I can’t tell if it’s the wind or my own rushing blood pressing on my eardrums. Hutch says “Ready.” He leans back and says “Set.”

And then… I’m in the sky.

Hutch taps me three times on my shoulder, signalling it’s time to spread my arms. I’m flying. It’s so, so noisy and I feel so, so small.

The parachute opens, and suddenly it’s silent. It’s silent, and I’m thousands of feet above Alberta. Hutch puts my hands in the loops on either side of the parachute and lets me steer. We can go fast or we can drift slowly. We’re falling and we’re in control.

I see a cluster of bodies below, and I realize they’re my three friends, looking up. I lift my legs up as we come in for a landing and my feet scrape against the grass. “I jumped out of a plane!” I say. I’m grinning so widely my face hurts.

I sit on the grass and stare at the big, blue Prairie sky as my friends do their jumps. I watch the aircraft become smaller and smaller as it makes its ascent. I watch a tiny dot grow bigger and bigger until the parachute’s silhouette becomes visible, followed shortly thereafter by my friends’ flushed, smiling faces.

Everyone was okay. Everyone was better than okay.