free falling

I see that I haven't written much lately.
I haven't quite gotten the skydiving pictures ready, which is why I haven't posted, so I'm just going to post without them. I'll get them eventually.
As for skydiving- yes, I think it helped symbolically with my fear, but not as significantly as I had hoped because I wasn't really afraid. The only time I felt any sort of fear clenching in me was when the plane was one hundred feet off the ground, because I looked out the open door at the country side near Kalispell and I thought, this is the last thing those people saw before they crashed. I felt very close to them, for an instant, to be experiencing almost exactly the last thing they experienced.
Being close to death is almost a spiritual experience for me, because I think that the moment I am closest to death is the exact moment that death seems the least real. All of the times I have come close to killing myself have been times when my own mortality has seemed so superficial. I felt kind of the same way on the skydiving plane. It is as if when I am closest to death, I can't see it, can't feel it, can't sense it in any way empirically, but can only try to convince myself of the knowledge of its existence in the absence of any proof.
The plane went a bit higher though and the strange feeling went away, and as we climbed up until the air blowing into the plane was cold, all of my senses seemed to deaden and I was washed over with calm. It wasn't dissociation (I promised myself I wouldn't let myself dissociate), it was just that profound disconnection that I experience occasionally when I am looking in the mirror and realize with a start that the reflection is supposed to be a reflection of some aspect of me, when in my mind it seems so alien and disconnected. The whole skydiving experience was a bit alien and disconnected. I didn't feel any butterflies in my stomach or anything as the instructor tightened me to him. The inevitability of jumping out of the plane at that point was comforting enough to assauge my fear. We shoudln't fear the inevitable. There is no changing it.
As we scooted to the door of the plane and my legs hung out over like 11,000 feet of nothingness, I felt that displacement that I feel whenever I fly. We had no location. In our movement, we were positionless, just as an electron is bound by the uncertainty principle. I was about to drop out of a plane, and for about five minutes I would almost cease to exist.

The fear was never there. My instructor counted to three, and I waited, excited but not nervous. We were flung from the plane. We flipped a few times before stabilizing. My hands shot out. I was suddenly, in a great wash, reminded of everything I had to love and live for. I realized how much I care when I felt how terribly badly I wanted that parachute to open. There is nothing like the possibility of death (more real as I fell than it felt in the plane) to make you appreciate life more.
Free fall was fun, but I didn't feel like I was falling. Nobody has, as yet, offered me a plausible explanation for this. If I close my eyes on a roller coaster, I feel as if I am falling, even if I don't have my eyes open for the frame of reference. With my eyes open or closed skydiving, I don't feel that falling sensation. I logically know I am falling, and the air pillows up around me as with each second my velocity increases by 9.8 m/s, but I don't feel it. There should be no difference between that and the roller coaster with my eyes shut. If anything, I should feel more like I am falling while skydiving because I am going so much faster. But I don't. Why?

I got a little a motion sick under canopy, but not terribly, as I had taken Dramamine (forgive my tense inconsistencies; I feel like my narration should be random today). When we turned, the leg straps kind of hurt my thighs, but it was okay. It was like parasailing at that point; fun, exciting. In fact the whole experience was fun and exciting, but not really a thrill. Some people I know get a big thrill out of skydiving; my brother and my aunt do, for instance. It wasn't really that exciting for me. It was something I am glad that I did, and something that was fun, but it was not nearly as fun or exciting as bungee jumping.

As for life since then... it's been fun. I only have a few days before I leave for Kansas for nationals, and I honestly am nowhere near ready. I have written three cases and started plowing through some articles on color revolutions, mostly contemporary ones in former "states" of the USSR, but other than that, I am extremely behind. I should be making briefs right now, but I can't get myself to. It's like with graduation came the cessation of any kind of work. I have mostly just been hanging out with Pat and Erin and other people and neglecting any semblence of work (except my actual job) entirely.

I still think about Josh a lot, and about hurting him the way that I did, and I try to reconcile it all in my mind but I can't. The passion or lust or whatever that I had for him kind of faded away with the intensity of our relationship, but I wish I could explain to him that I still care about him infinitely, that I still love him intensely in the way that I love Erin. I'm not sure how I can fix any damage I have created, and I don't know if it would be fair if I did know how, but there it is. Life's like that, sometimes, I guess. That's what my counselor said when I was lamenting to her about hurting Josh. She said, sometimes it just goes like that.

I sincerely hope that it doesn't "just go like that," that hurting people is never inevitable or necessary. I never want to hurt anyone again the way that I hurt Josh. But I guess I have to find it in me to keep going.

I have been feeling kind of off lately. I'm still sorting through the causes within myself. I have felt a lot of urges to self injure, but I have been fighting them valliantly. I hope that they go away though. It seems as if they are just increasing in intensity sometimes.

I'm going to go cut out briefs now. Really, I am.