I once jumped off a cliff with my friend. Ill-prepared, I undid the button of my shorts and slid off my shirt, arranged myself in my underwear in front of a gathering of people, and climbed up the rocks in my favorite shoes. I don't quite spend much time jumping or leaping or falling. The nerves had me a few pieces. But I thought, if my friend jumps, I jump.
So my friend (my endearingly fearless friend with a craving of a defiant bird) jumped. I reached the top and looked down at the dark water. A slew of people tilted their heads up at me, squinting through their sunglasses, and anticipating my springing stint. Artlessly, I leaped into the air. My toes pointed to the bottom and my arms flailing from the unfamiliarity of gravity. My duration in the air lasted long enough for me to ponder of my life and reevaluate my decisions. All my decisions. Like a common flash of everyone's imagination. Then after a year of falling, I knifed through the water and the flash battered into darkness. And the darkness was a muffled quiet. It was a deadened distortion more closely contrasted to an emptying clarity. I fished up to the surface until the blur of a sunny day came back to my consciousness. I gasped for air like the result of my purging. Of a momentary catharsis. Of moments I neglect to be a part of.
When I got back to the rocks, I looked up at my friend with the assumption that she knew exactly what I was feeling. Then I looked up to the view of where I was just seconds ago. And I contemplated those seconds and how those seconds became a persistence of merely some of my time.
I sat on the rocks and thought about being a remainder. I understood then that after a leap, you become a fragment of yourself. An excess leftover of what was before. Like reusable waste. Just as action and consequence and even continuity come into play, you lose as much as you gain and what ever you have is what ever is left. And it's tedious and repetitive but, everything to me now is just remains of everything before.
