Melange Magazine

Creative Non-Fiction

My First Jump
By lee lyn-ni

In an attempt to describe who or what I am, I pause and look out at the world flashing by the car window. Surrounded by golden mountain ranges on all sides, pregnant clouds hovering expectantly above our speeding car, I reflect on the lives trapped inside with me.

Quiet, all I hear is the uncompromising wind wheezing past as I watch his steady hands steer. The bright sunlight reflects off his Tieurot watch and he glances impatiently at it from time to time. I know his need to reach Queenstown in time, we all feel it, grumpy and tired and unable to release the pent-up energy inside our rented shell. We were all alike after all, the Lees’ of Tropicana, Malaysia: each of us eager for the new discovery of the next town on our itinerary, grinding down on the miles of the interminable highway and exclaiming excitedly at another copper-blue lake, or mountain range dotted with random spots of foliage. Whenever I see this expansive view spread out before me, the urge to fling away my clothes, sunglasses and the rest of my trappings of civilization rises up in me. I wonder how it is like to run through the hills with my arms outstretched, to feel the wind and the wildflowers caressing my body, and allowing my mind to soar without inhibition, as the flow of my blood transcends my body to merge with the dusty earth beneath my feet. The picture of man as one with Nature flashes through my mind even though I am peering out from the confines of the car. The myths and countless stories of Antony and Cleopatra, nobly misunderstood Hamlet, fantastical realism of Eva Luna among others surpass their intended function and merge to become the detailed background of the human story. Sweat and blood mixed with tears are the foundations of our civilization but what drove them on to destroy empires and build new ones from scratch? Reasons to do something are far and few and sometimes when you are offered the option to jump down a perfectly good bridge, the question becomes more than why.

Blind fear and natural instinct clouds the path to the answer but as Frank Herbert said, “fear is the mind killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.” Hearing these words pound through my mind, I made my decision and “took the road less travelled”. Stepping out from the car towards the Karawoa Bridge, I couldn’t consider turning back although every inch of my being stood up on its ends and made me a shivering puddle of mass. At the side of the cliff facing me, a crowd had gathered to watch my 43 metre plunge into pure, naked nothingness; the descent into air. But at that moment, my eyes were cast inwards, into the depths of my soul to scrutinise the path I had chosen.

Has Helen Keller ever seen the fluttering wings of a butterfly perched on its flower? Or heard the thundering roar of Nature in the guise of heavy Niagara Falls? Her imagination may leap the bounds of her confining reality and this is because that handicap never became her reason not to try. She fought the prevailing conditions of her surroundings because deep down in her consciousness, she knew she could discover a rational world that made sense. Drowning out the discouraging voices from her inner demons and exterior ones, she searched for meaning and at times when there were no suitable answers, she came up with her own.

My mind was a weapon I could train, I realized, as I counted down mentally with the reassuring Kiwi guide behind me. More than that, it was a reason to forge my own path of scholarly understanding, to grab the latent meaning of words from empty air and make them mine, and seek the way where others more experienced have gone before. When I reached the number one, all reason and logic flew to the wind as I see the choppy river, waving pine trees and the rest of the world rush to meet my face. “One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar”, a girl born mute and deaf said once. She was referring to the spark of desire that begins small within one self, but develops into a roaring fire of motivation when the conscious, dedicated decision to commit has been made. Abruptly, the freefall down changes into a life-saving swing as I bounced up and down on the bungee cord.

My plunge into a lifelong commitment of freedom may not have changed the lifestyle I continue or the staunch beliefs in God, country and friends. Instead, what I experienced was something like the imperceptible change of spring arriving; when to one’s surprise, fully-grown daisies stand proudly in yellow spots among the brown, dried grass of the past winter. The germinating seed that was the beginning of the flower, which was also the root of all of Nature; its philosophical beginnings, followed by the logical sequence of growth, maturity; who knew where it came from? Does one ponder to think of the origin when the full-blown cheeks of the rosy future stare you right at the face?

Maybe watching my life flash before me in an eternal second, or feeling my heart almost falling through my gaping mouth where a noiseless scream emerges, one or any or none of these could be the reason for my renewed firm grasp on the world. The jump off the bridge, a potential suicide that would have met its destiny, if not for the vital cord, has instilled a greater urge in me to understand why one would commit themselves to create a purposefully difficult situation in where a careless mistake could sweep off the starting block in UNO STACK and mere seconds later, hear the unmistakable sound of destruction wreaked.

In turn, I begin to want. To feel. To breathe properly. To learn. Once more. Life in all its impossible possibilities, consisting of crisscrossed winding paths, all leading to the same place but differing in length and incline. To be so close to death, one almost understands the point of tolerating the average 80 earth-years of a human life. And I would be so lucky to feel the sneaky tendrils of this knowledge or peer into the endless well of education, if only just one more time.