I jumped out of a plane.

Or, I guess I was pushed out of a plane? Thrown? I dunno. I was in a plane attached a guy and that guy jumped out of a plane and I went with him. His name was Ilya. He kept me alive. He’d probably say that the parachute kept me alive; he did tell me that the people who packed the parachute before the jump kept us both alive.

“How many people are nervous vs excited vs terrified?” I asked him while he was harnessing me up.

“Everyone’s nervous. Hell, I’m nervous. Every single time. Your body never really gets used to it.”

But that’s part of the appeal. I can already tell. I wasn’t nervous when he said that, but as the red altimeter on his wrist pushed us over 1000 feet, it started to feel real. By 7000 feet, I was officially hooked in and ready to go, “But we’ve got time.” In the time between 10 and 13,500 feet, the folks who didn’t need someone strapped in to help them out had already jumped: an international women’s team; three men well into retirement working on some sort of sky choreography; the guy who was Ilya’s first tandem partner however many years ago.

By the time I was up at the door, the nerves had definitely kicked in. I didn’t really have much to do other than “breathe and relax,” but your eyes look down more than two miles and your brain screams. 1,2,3.

Terminal velocity comes after only 9 seconds, which were some of the most harrowing of my life. Did you know the human body can just go 120 miles per hour? I didn’t, until I felt it.

Of course I screamed! But, like, the scream you hear on roller coasters. I didn’t think I was going to die, but my body sure didn’t know that. Intellectually, I was actually much more afraid of losing my shoes, which felt a little too loose for comfort during that descenet. But it was a bit late for that, so I turned in my feet and expanded my toes, and tried to breathe.

“The air is coming at you real fast, but it’s just air.”

It doesn’t feel like just air as it rushes around and above and into and through you like that, but you can breathe it. Somewhat labored breaths, but breathes nonetheless. He taps me to let me know the ripcord pull is coming — we’re about halfway down now, and it jerks me up. (My shoes stay on.)

From there, things slow. And I can take in the scenery, the green of the Hudson Valley. If the earth was flat, I’d see New York City in the distance. It’s not, so I don’t.

Shame.

For a minute or two, he let me steer our parachute, done by pulling on a pair of handles: a little left, a little right, a couple of 180s (though never quite a 360). In some ways, this is even more nerve-wracking than the initial fall, because my brain can actually comprehend what’s happening. But it feels incredible. There truly is a freedom up there unlike any I’ve ever felt. Because it’s the only place I’ve been — the only place you can be — where in every direction is nothing.

Between the plane and the endpoint is just me (us) and my (our) parachute. Whatever track we (he) want(s) to set is the one we (we) take, and it can never be the same one twice. He’s jumped from that plane thousands of times by now (you need 300 solo jumps before you can even consider strapping on someone else), but he never leaves or lands in precisely the same place. Maybe he pulls the cord a hundred or a thousand feet sooner or later. The clouds will always be in a new place: “Watch the clouds,” he said over and over again. “They will tell you everything.”

And still he gets nervous, because he must get nervous because the moment your body thinks this is normal is the moment you really do die.

“There’s nothing like your first time… though it feels this good every time.”

As I write these words, I’m a little more than two hours out from my landing, and I’m still buzzing: it’ll be at least another couple of hours before I truly calm down. And I now viscerally understand the “junkie” part of “adrenaline junkie.”

While it’s good for my personal longevity that my immediate reaction was “LEMME GO WRITE ABOUT THIS” and not “LEMME GAMBLE AWAY MY LIFE’S SAVINGS” or “LEMME FIND SOME USED NEEDLES”… I know I want to feel this again.

Dang it.