2020 Jan 01
California, USA
Forty felt like a heavy door closing, but the gift my husband and friends gave me to enter into a new year of me, was a full day of gastronomic adventures topped off by my first skydiving experience! A few mimosas swishing inside me may not have been the best way to enter into the plane, but I remember the biting cold at 13,000 feet and the smell of aviation fuel. When the door rolled open, the world looked like a Google Earth map, distant and abstract. The instructor shouted something, and then—gravity disappeared. The freefall wasn't like falling at all; it was a physical confrontation with the wind, a roar so loud it became a kind of silence. For sixty seconds, I wasn't a manager, a wife, or a mother with a mortgage. I was just a heartbeat in a jumpsuit. Then, the snap of the chute. The sudden transition to absolute stillness was breathtaking. I drifted over the patchwork fields of the valley, watching the shadow of our parachute dance below. I landed with a clumsy thud and a grin that didn't leave my face for a week. The first person I embraced after landing was my husband, who hugged me tighter than the paraschute straps and lifted me off the ground in whooping joy; before putting me back on Earth he whispered how proud he was of me. It turns out forty wasn't a closing door; it was a wide-open sky.
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