Another stupid precipice.

There is 50 minutes. And it will be spent without editing.
So in advance I beg forgiveness for the poor coordination of these fingers.

The precipice, as it occurs every day has grown strange.
It’s no longer defined by its fear of height, or that sensation of falling where your heart makes your throat choke and then you die before you even hit the ground. There’s no remembrance of that.

What is so different is that it’s static. So I can meander along this brink as much as I want, but there is a horrid calm before some storm and it is freeze framed like in the national geographic. Or a paused frame in a film.

Even more accurately defined there is shaved tree – a tall one – that has fallen across a crevice between two tall mountains. Miles apart. It was a very big tree.
There is no concept of wind. There are no sounds, except what sounds muted under water. It is my breath. There are no animals, no homely picture inviting me on either end. The end where I am leaving, and the end where I am going.

In fact, I’m sure there is no air – I’m just hearing my breath because it’s normal to hear yourself in times of true silence.
I used to think, when I was a child, that baths were far more exciting than showers because I could hear the bubbles of my shampoo while I scrubbed my hair. And I heard it once in the shower. And I thought maybe, since I was 9 when that first happened, that I would hear them again at precisely twice my age. That it was some gift bent on doubling and that it denoted some right of passage. Not necessarily into womanhood but maybe into some kind of calm.
I grew up in the country. Chinese people read tea leaves, I listen to shampoo.

The nonsensical fear of passing across this bridge - “perilous” as it would be described by a cheesy smut writer, was that I would fall. And as I said the fear was not that I would keep falling, not that I would swallow my own fear-induced vomit but that utterly nothing would happen. That I would float. I would be caught in suspension in the air of this dark hole. Unable to “swim” to either rock face to start climbing. No flying. It would be like Jesus falling off a boat into the middle of the ocean, not drowning, but that he would be caught, able to move joints, unable to disposition himself. Like fly trap paper.

This moment can also be likened to that frozen point where you think you are about to die, or that you are about to incur serious wrath, or that point where you hear bad news. It is stasis. It is the silence before the understanding. Except a life time long.

It is on going. I am walking. Because I have to. The cows know the grass is greener on the other side – that’s why they used to jump the fence when I chased them. So I’ve decided to walk.
People who sit on the first side of nothingness are depressed. In the very least the journey across a large stick seemingly placed between two different planets will be a learning experience, even if I never get to write those experiences down because I fall into limbo fly traps.

I’ll throw a big fit – especially during the 8th day or the 2nd week where I’ll scream and pound my fists and cry and be especially insulted when nothing happens. Walk on indignantly and in the end come out to some other unknown.
I wish I could picture it being sunny but falling into a sunny limbo denotes a tan and that’s definitely not ominous.

All of this because a strange man kissed me and I put my life into perspective. Apologies to that man who kissed me because I thought about it. It wasn’t your fault!