Therapy

Skydiving wasn't the memorable experience I'd anticipated. I mean, sure, it wasn't bad: the slight but perceptible curvature in the offing; the silvery gleam of the light on a sea of such an impossible and perfect blue that the person I was a few months ago would have cried remembering it; the strange sensation of movement and stillness at the same time, with the skin of my face flapping like a flag under a hurricane just before being torn off and lost, forgotten, in the storm of time; the perspective of a bird, of a god, of a world that shines as if it were the dawn of creation and not borrowed time; the pull in my thighs, in my shoulders, and the sudden silence when the children of Aeolus abruptly went still.

'Tis damn dissociation I've been living lately, as if I were a passenger in my own body or a spectator in my own mind, watching as another who is myself lives and feels.

Later in the afternoon I lie by the pool imagining I'm a lizard in speedo, absorbing sunlight and the warmth of the ground. And as I put my hand in the water, I remember a tale that one of my uncles, who lived for a time in the Amazon, told me: one of his colleagues put his legs in the river to cool off and, when he went to take them out, he discovered that some very discreet piranhas had eaten them up to his mid-calf.