From A Great Height

The other morning, I was sitting on a balcony 4 stories up and I had this strange longing to throw myself off of it. Now don't call the Crisis Hotline or my therapist. I don't have a death wish or a real plan to do myself in. I just have always had a fascination with heights. The strange thing is that I am also deathly afraid of them.

It is dreadful, but I cannot stop imagining myself leaping from one precipice to another, defying the laws of gravity. When I was a kid and I sat in big church with my parents, I used to imagine jumping to and from these giant light fixtures that hung from the ceiling of the sanctuary.

I wrote about free-fall in an earlier post and I am still fascinated. To leap from a balcony or a plane or another such height would be to be absolutely free and absolutely filled with fear in the same moment. It is this place where my fear and fantasy are joined at the core.