Tomorrow is one year since my mom died.
It’s been one hell of year.

Okay, I had wanted to write something really good today because I knew I wouldn’t be writing on the one year anniversary, but i’m going to be honest. I went out last night for a few hours to hang out with a friend and I slept in this morning.  Usually I will get restless around 5am and instead of laying there thinking until my alarm at 6am, I get up.  Not this morning though. I slept through the 5am pre alarm wake up and then snoozed through the 6am and then at 7 Murphy decided he’d had enough of my laziness and pulled the covers of and yipped at me.
I looked at the clock flashing on my phone and a slow, damn near evil smile lit up my sleepy face.  I. Slept. In.

Now for the last half hour I have been staring at my blinking cursing and listening to a banger of a bridge on a hidden Taylor Swift track that I can’t think of anything I can write about.
There is this need to just stare at my life in front of me like a dog that heard a high pitched noise and is trying to figure out what and where it’s coming from.  This is my life.
.
I knew when I finally let go, I would have to jump and would find myself in freefall.  Where I landed out is always the question whenever I would jump (skydive) in real life.  There were always stages of getting ready to jump.  The getting geared up.  This is where you make sure you have all the things you need to save your life.  You manifest and then wait for the plane that would take you to the playground in the sky. The ride up you’re surrounded by people that are making sure they had everything they needed, laughing, teasing and often singing.  This is where I would get nervous and anxious.  My instructor would tell me, “check your gear and then check the gear of everyone around you.”
It was a distraction, but I got very good at ring one, down, ring two, down, ring three, down. If I was going to leave this plane all by myself then I was going to make sure when it was my time to jump I would be able to save my own life because no one was going to do it for me.
Then the door would open and the highest of high anxiety would radiate from my core.  “Why do I keep doing this?” was a question I would ask myself every time I would get on that plane to go to 13k feet to jump out.  Then I would swing out and hold on to the bar above the door and count out. In One, Two, Three  (SEE YA) I would launch out and for a one second my brain would accept the fact that I had let go of the bar that held me to the plane that kept me alive.   It’s been years since I have jumped, but that feeling has never left me…the one where you are in 100% in control of if you live or die.  The outcome of this jump comes down to the next minute of your life.  If you panic and can’t get your body ready for falling at 120 mph, there is no one strapped to your back to make the big moves for you.  If you don’t check your altimeter, if you don’t check your surroundings, if you can’t pull, if you do pull and you find that you have a ball of shit above your head, what if it came down to a cutaway?
Sometimes life lets you level out, It lets you take a look around you while you’re falling towards the earth, it lets you smile at your friends who are falling too.  It lets you take the unlikeliest of places to play.  It lets you do spins and flips. It lets you hold on to your friends and spins you around until you’re launched into a new direction. When it’s the perfect time you reach behind you and you pull and you wait to see what the parachute is going to do.  The biggest lesson I learned was when my lines were twisted and I had to remember what you do when that happens.  You grab those twisted lines and you push and kick out like a mother fucker.
I never mastered landing. Overshot my landing by too far, taco’ed my parachute and dropped from 60 feet, broke my toe once. I did it though, I lived (and scared everyone) but I did it.  I saved my own fucking life.

Sometimes I forget the lessons I learned while skydiving.  It was good to remember this today.