There is a short film I watched a few months ago, I think it's called Ten Meter Tower. The film shows a number of people who were offered a symbolic amount of money to jump off of a high dive at a swimming pool, which they had never done before.

The film does not show the people who did not participate because they had jumped off the board before. It does not show the people who had never jumped and were not interested in jumping. It does not show the people who got to the ladder, looked all the way up, and changed their minds. The film and therefore we are only interested in what happens to the people who actually make it all the way up to the diving board. Even there, it shows very few people who just get to the top of the board, run to the edge, and jump. It does not show people after they leave the board, and so you can only wonder how they continued, elegantly or otherwise, through thirty feet of air, plunging down into another six feet or so of water that may or may not have been very cold.

The film mostly shows the people standing at the top of the board hesitating, for various reasons, to jump. There is a part of them that wants to jump – the part that said sure, went to the pool, changed clothes, looked all the way up and still felt like trying; the part that felt the cold metal of the ladder pressing hard against the arches of their feet, all those steps to the top. But there is a part of them that is afraid. An animal part that does not want to fall, does not want to be hurt. Is so afraid that climbing back down the ladder, which is after all the only other way out, seems like possibly less of a failure than whatever frightens them about jumping. And so they stand there, weighing the options, trying to articulate the fear, giving themselves pep talks or letting words close over their heads like water in which they are drowning. Some of them (30%) never jump.

I think about this film almost every day. That I probably wouldn't have agreed to do it because I am not excited about the idea of someone filming me in a bathing suit, or because I don't especially like swimming pools, the smell of chlorine, or because the part of me that is intimately familiar with falling on sidewalks would be afraid of cracking my head on the side of the board. But if I did agree to do it and got as far as the diving board, I don't think I would have a problem with jumping. It's not that I think I am brave: I'm not. So much of my life has been getting to the other side of something that terrified me – moving to new countries, anything with microphones, dating – and then realizing it was not that scary and after all lots of people do those things. So partly I would do it because I have learned over time that once I've done something it's not a big deal. And partly I would do it because I would want to eliminate the retrospective embarrassment of having dithered in front of others. And – a little – I would do it because I would want to know that I had, to have the memory of it as a time I overcame my smaller, more fearful self. But mostly I would do it because I would be so overwhelmingly curious: how would it feel to fall deliberately like that, would there even be time to feel the rush of air before the plunge into the water? Would the water be cold, or when you fly into it do you not really notice? How would it be to experience those weightless worlds in quick succession? A woman, a bird, a fish, a mermaid, a woman. I would want to know. 

Why would you jump? Why don't you?

The inability to know or even have a really good sense for your importance to others, your value. The feeling that knowing this would be really worthwhile and the sort of tentative examination of that followed by the complete knowledge that such examinations are tedious and dull and prove nothing if not your own total lack of importance and worth to anyone ever. Your desire to escape that knowledge. The plunge into activity, into myriad activities, into hobbies and into the lives of others, the submersion meant to remove or at least alleviate the amount of time spent on tedious self doubt. The moment of gazing, enraptured, at an object or objects of affection, the stretches of time you spend watching someone as if they were a film laid out for your observation. The pure delight of stepping past that watching and into seeing. How it feels to know someone with that intensity. The moment of wondering if anyone sees or has ever seen you with such completeness and such pleasure. The inability to know or even have a really good sense for your importance to others. The days you can spend looping this. The days you could spend doing something else. 

This is an ice floe in the cold cold ocean. A low flat mass of moving ice, the cocktail accessory of the arctic.

To this ice floe, in the course of their journeys, come titans and curiosity seekers. What an iceberg they say. I bet it stretches for miles. They plan a lifetime of destruction and exploration, whichever comes first, or both. But the ice floe goes no deeper; it is what it appears to be. It is a flat glittery surface, and nothing more. This is a perfectly lovely place for a polar bear to float along in search of better land, black nose hidden under white paw. This is a good place to fling aside a monster invented in haste and repented at leisure. This is a cold place, in short, that is nevertheless an inviting enough home for a few weirdos, human flotsam, at least temporarily. But it is no more than that.

The ships say they don't want any drama and then finding none back away and steer towards another iceberg.

The ice floe makes a list of other words that start with FL — flow, flexible, flirt, flake, flimsy, fleeting — and waits for the next anguished creature seeking refuge, the next boatload of self-destruction to flop uselessly against its shallow nature. Initial appearances aside, it never pretended to be anything else, after all. 

How they will always insist on seeing what you do in some different way and then saying that their way is the way you really see it. This is about sex, they say, and you say that it is not, that it is simply nature and that it is free and they nod coyly and say sure sure, sex is natural sex is free. This was not your point. Your point was that a flower bursting into bloom, the colors inducing synesthesia, the purple exploding in your mouth, is beautiful enough as it is. Does not have to be joculared into a sex organ of anything other than what it is. How they will insist, though, and juxtapose the photographs of your actual naked body as if it proves rather than clearly invalidates their point. If you wanted bodies you would have had bodies, would have had soft downy hair beaded with sweat, the salt flavor strong on the tongue in your mind. The implication of metaphor when your gaze and your hands have never been anything more than perfectly direct. And now you are painting the world on the other side of a bone and all they want to talk about is the bone, which they say represents your fear of death. As if you felt such fear; as if any fear could keep you from what you want. As if you were ever interested in the picked-clean curve when the blue sky on the other side was all you wanted, that clear perfect cerulean and the moon nesting in it. Death, to the extent you will indulge the metaphor, is only the frame for the place you are aiming to capture. And yet they insist. You blink at them in lashless boredom, a portrait of zero fucks given, and pick up the brush and get back to the sky.

Three things I'd like to learn:

When to trust history and when to acknowledge that each situation is unique. I know this story. I know how it ends. There is truth in the condemnation of Santayana, but it's almost satisfying to feel it click into place, that conclusion, the dream or nightmare come true. Or on the other hand: be here now, let this moment be exactly this moment; stop pre-judging.

When to push and when to forgive myself. I hate social gatherings, hate leaving the comfort and security of my home at all times and even more in the winter. On the other hand, some of the deepest experiences and most interesting people of my life were on the other side of that door. It's good to go out, to go beyond comfort, to introduce myself to people, new flavors, icy-cold rivers, both for the pride in my own bravery and (more importantly) for the chance to experience wonder. On the other hand, some nights out send me to days in bed, burned fingers and eyes raw from exhaustion, and when I feel that coming it is just better for everybody if I bolt the door, get under the  blankets with a book or a TV binge and recharge. It's just so hard to know which gut feeling to trust.

When to walk and when to stay. The older I get the more I am persuaded that the moment I think I should walk I should just walk. Because if I walk and I am wrong, I won't know it: walking carries me to a new place and I rarely want to go back once I get out. But if I stay and I am wrong: vinegar and salt, all the things I might have stayed for turned bitter and sad. There are times I stayed when I should have run and I know that because I stayed. Still, how can you know you have sucked the marrow out of life until you put the bone in your mouth?

I'd also like to learn how to paint my nails without getting nail polish all over the place, to wear skirts, and to play the ukulele, but you know, one thing at a time.  

The children who grew up with a mother who did not or could not or would not love; with fathers who were absent, physically or literally, from the beginning or the middle or the end; with siblings who only held hands to play cruel games of indian burns and rose gardens and stop hitting yourself. These children wandering the world now, emotional orphans, heavy with the weight of longing and never able to feel the ground, unable to recognize how it feels when they land on something solid, pushing themselves away before the anticipated rejection, the fist in the stomach, the mouth, the heart. So lonely and so broken. Years of therapy if they're lucky, to learn the words that should have been their native language, mother tongue. Even decades later it can take them forever just to utter eight letters, and recognizing the transient shimmer of that truth would be enough to render them fetal, if they felt there were any comfort to be had there. 

That weekend we turned the bed into a raft in the middle of the oceanic chaos of life. Dressed in pajamas that doubled as tatters from our shipwrecks, we pulled up buckets of food from the market downstairs and ate them with our hands. During the day we played games with dice and told stories we'd gathered from other sailors, other shipwrecks. The dragons and the sirens that circled us were visible, horrible terrors, but I trusted the safety of our vessel. You found chocolate in a kit that floated by and fed it to me in small bittersweet squares. From time to time the waves of our narrow escape washed over the edges and at night we held fast to each other in the center of the raft, safe and dry while our dreams rocked us to sleep. Nightmares, too, to be fair, but we weathered the storms. We did not even hoist a flag; we did not expect or wish to be rescued. So happy were we to still be alive and together that we did not think beyond that moment, or at least I did not. On the last day we woke and I thought we would create a new island and explore it together, more adventures and maybe stories around a campfire, the structure of our imaginary world was already taking beautiful shape in my mind. In my heart. And you turned to me and said, "I'm not like you. I never wanted to spend the whole weekend in bed in my pajamas." 

Nails that were bitten back for years, the stunted beds telling the history of decades of gnawing, like a rat or more correctly a mouse, the wearing down the result of compulsive nibbles, over and over, through the keratin, also through the rough bits of skin, torn cuticles, fingers shamecurled into palms when it comes time to meet ladies. Finally after years. each nail capped with a half moon of self-control and now we find we are picking at other things. We want to be smooth, to be without blemish, polished marble. Museum quality. There are scabs and they are awful, brown crusts of things that happened some time ago, and we tear them off with our newly sharp nails and they bleed and crust and we tear them. Picking scabs, feral, crouched in a corner with tangled hair and a mouth full of blood. The taste of old pennies. No, today we are more careful, today we are smiling across the table, that smile that is the tips of the teeth and cool blue assessing eyes and no, tell me about you, how are you? and when we come home we take ourselves off the leash and pick and tear and the dismay creaks in our throats because we do still bleed, even when we've lowered our body temperature to ice. It's exhausting. It would be good to stop. It would be so, so good to stop. But please you have to believe me that there is a day when I will scrape off the scab and all that will be left underneath is a shiny scar, flawless as glass, the color of skim milk. And then it will be over, and then I will have a story to tell, and then we will drink something delicious that almost burns and we will laugh so hard at the shit we did when we were younger and foolish, once it is a scar it is a story and once it is a story it is a shield, a clear, good laugh. I promise I'm getting there. I'm sorry it takes so long.