I think I’m an addict. Can you tell me if I’m one? I asked my brother and he said I share the symptoms of an addict. I can’t live without it. It’s impossible not to do it at least once a day. It’s hard to say. I mean, I think I’m partially one. But my brother says I need help and should probably join a support group.
That is, if there are support groups for aeromaniacs.
I just don’t get it. Like in general. I don’t know if it’s going to end. All I know is that once a day, I need to have that literal natural high feeling and fall to the ground with a thud.
No doubt, I’ve landed myself in the hospital a few times. My legs are probably permanently broken and my arm has almost snapped in half, but I’m still living. I’m still breathing. As long as I can still scale my roof and jump down onto a trampoline, I’ll survive.
I have to make sacrifices. I’m not saving up for a car; I’m saving up for sky diving lessons. I’m not going to get high with all the other kids in my school, I’m going to get high and land, safely if I’m lucky (which I usually am). I don’t become devastated when I here someone jumped from a building, I just go, “Whoa. Really? Do you know how fast he was going?”
My parents have tried to help me. My dad’s always going, “Lucy, honey. Please don’t try to go off the Anderson’s two-story, OK?”
I would nod, they would leave, and then I’d run out the front door and ask the Andersons if they needed house sitting anytime soon.
I won’t deny it. I have a problem.
It’s cost me a lot, too. When I first started jumping, my friends videotaped it and posted it on the Internet for laughs. Now, they try not to get too close to me. They’re worried that one day when I jump, I’ll kill myself, so they’d rather not get to know me too well and feel so much pain.
I don’t care.
I really, truly, honestly don’t care.
Besides, aren’t you supposed to not care of what people think of you?
That’s what my boyfriend always said.
I think the worst thing lost was my boyfriend.
He was a character; I’ll give him that. He would always goof off in movie theaters. Remember that movie Mean Girls? During one of the scenes, he started strutting up and down the aisles. People whispered about him, but he didn’t care. My friends and I started laughing and ruined the movie for everyone. One day, we got bored and decided to go to the video arcade at the mall and he tried playing two games at one time. On a class field trip to the science museum, he hung off the side of the escalator as it was going down. One night, he crashed a sleep over of mine and slept under my bed. My mother never found out. And the first time he said that he loved me, he was screaming over a Backyardigans episode when we were recruited to watch his four-year-old brother.
That was May 29, 2007. The day before his accident on the thirtieth.
I think that’s when it started.
That’s when the whole jumping-off-roofs-to-get-a-natural-high thing started.
He would’ve acted like a total idiot, just because it was different. He was a different person. He did different things. That’s why I was his girlfriend, I wasn’t different. I was just a normal girl who fell for this abnormal boy. People must have thought I was a total freak.
I don’t care.
He would jump off buildings onto a trampoline, I’m sure. He would do it. He might not be addicted to it as I am, but he would try it once or twice. I guess I think of it as my only way being close to him, whether it’s for two or three seconds.
I miss him. Who wouldn’t miss him? He was amazing. No, he still is amazing. For someone not to care at all what other people think of them or not to care if people are watching them is a never-ending battle that he won. I admire that.
I one hundred percent, completely, fully, admire that.
So when I miss him, I jump. It’s healthier than jungle juicing my problems out or rebelling against someone. All I’m doing is flying. Flying for a brief period of time where I just feel weightless.
And who doesn’t want to feel weightless? When you’re weightless, all your problems evaporate from you. There’s nothing against you or with you. No worries. No fears. No doubts.
I’m like an active skeleton. I’ve lost life, but I found a way to replenish it.
This is who I am and I’m accepting it.
Better yet, I’m enjoying it.