The jump

I didn’t see the bottom from where I was standing. It was a black abyss.

The tiny speck plummeting at incredible speed amidst the swallowing darkness was my arch enemy. I realised that a piece of his shirt — still warm and damp from sweat— was in my fist, fluttering impatiently at the mercy of the sharp wind that wouldn’t make up it’s mind which direction it wanted to blow from.

‘Just great! I almost had him but as always, he has an escape route.’ I said to the dancing shard of cloth in my hand, releasing it to the wind.

I could feel my body shift restlessly in anticipation with what I was considering.

Why was I even thinking this. Could I jump after him even if I wanted to? No human would make that jump without the intention of transporting himself to the morgue; he must have a plan. Some contraption or scheme that would allow him safe landing.

Thinking about landing… I couldn’t see the bottom of the hole, did it even have one?

If not, infinity seems a bit… well, permanent. I wasn’t sure I was ready to commit yet.

Many ghosts of such thoughts did parkour on the neurons inside my brain in the microseconds that passed.

My hair alerted me first. A huge wall of air was pressing up against my front, this wasn’t like before. This was much more urgent, it wanted to throw me back.

Then my ears started giving off some weird signals. I was in fact lying, face down. What?

My eyes only registered a tiny speck of yellow within the blackness that surrounded me, where was I?

It dawned on me once all my sensors finished their respective reports; Before I had decided to, my body had jumped. It took advantage of my contemplation and willed my leg muscles to do a very familiar programmed action. They had done so a million time before, and it had yet to have failed them. We always landed on our feet. Well… almost always. We had never jumped into the blackness before.

Blackness huh… suddenly I was reassured by the same thoughts that had advised me not to jump.

‘There was probably no bottom, and therefore, no danger of being reduced to a splatter on some unknown surface’

Suddenly, the prospect of committing to this blackness didn’t seem like a bad option.

What different was it from the jump that had started as we were born. Plummeting seemed like it should’ve been the most natural thing for me, but it wasn’t. My being desperately wanted a hook, a latch, something to grab, something to break the fall.

Alas in the darkness, there were no assurances.