“Well, you only have one life to live,” my girlfriend, Shelly, said, leaping from the airplane, a strange man strapped to her back. We’d only been dating for two months, but already she had me questioning every notion of my identity. If she’d asked me to walk across hot coals, I might have considered it. Somehow, she’d overwhelmed my overactive disaster imagination.
And there I was, in the ultimate one life to live moment, as the plane’s engines roared and deafened and the thin air of ten thousand feet whipped around me in the emptied-out cabin. Another strange man, this one attached to my back, squeezed my shoulder and maneuvered us toward the gaping doorway. “Remember, all you have to do is fall forwards.”
I asked again if falling backwards was an exit option. I could see the man smirking over my shoulder. “Nope. There’s only one way out.” One way out of this one life to live, I thought. But I didn’t want out. I wanted back in. I was skilled at letting things rush up at me without facing them head on. My sister’s cancer, my parent’s divorce, my fourth-choice college. My long-term girlfriend, who got bored with the long-term. And now Shelly. Little Shelly, with her diminutive stature and giant personality, whom I’d met on a snowy night. Little Shelly, who peered up at me from her fur-lined parka with all-knowing owl eyes and soon convinced me to go sledding at two AM. Little Shelly, who, by the end of the night had provided me with a broken thumb and an expansive future.
I was falling now and, although Shelly was not my tandem, she was the one who’d made me face forward—tumbling toward the strange (but not unlovable) man I’d become.
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