Perspective (Part 1: Welcome)

The problem with jumping out of a plane and into the middle of an ocean is mainly about perspective.

One: I can't gauge how far away the water is from my point of entrance in the sky. I'm wearing a parachute, but not entirely sure that pulling it is going to do me any favors.

Two: The ocean is fucken vast. I don't know for certain that I can't swim to the nearest island, jetty, or continent from this middle point, but I'm probably going to wish I'd packed a raft, and possibly some crackers.

Three: How exactly did I get to the point of my life where I'm jumping out of planes to begin with? Into an ocean no less? Which ocean? I've got no idea, which further impedes my perspective problems.

Four: I can't see the damned coastline.

They tell me distance helps with perspective. You don't write about the shit currently going down in your life, you wait a while. Realize that maybe the problem wasn't the person you've been blaming for the past several months, but, perhaps you. YOU may be the problem. And maybe being left crying in your kitchen wasn't a major moment in your life. Maybe it was no more important than that time you were halfway home from the grocery store before you realized you'd forgotten the toothpicks, which were the whole reason you went to the grocery store in the first place. Allow time to remove you from the events and they somehow seem less important. Or at the very least, less dire.

Right?

Ryan was dead over five years before I started writing about him. Elvis was a couple years gone. Beckee Krackow was a distant memory. And then I started writing about Ben when he was sitting almost directly behind me in the apartment his parents paid for. We began fighting over the way I was portraying him, and grew incredibly distant, which really didn't help either of our perspectives at all.

And then Sora happened. And I'm writing about how in love I am with this person I barely know, who moves into my house somewhere around the third date. And do you know what happens next?

No you don't.

A computer crashes. An account is hacked. A relationship falters. A friendship is ruined. Many, many people have sex. A job intensifies. A family stops speaking to each other. A fuse is blown. And I'm standing on the edge of a tiny little biplane over God knows what ocean, ripcord in hand, trying to figure out when to jump, and which direction to swim in. Knowing that every direction is uphill, and how the fuck do you swim up hill?

Very carefully?

No.

You swim up hill like your knees are bleeding and your feet are made of sharks. You swim up hill like the crest of that wave can launch you past the horizon. You swim up hill like you took lessons, even though you know you're self-taught at best, ignorant at worst, and...is it just me or does everyone I've ever fucked turn out to be emotionally retarded? What does that say about...where did that metaphor go?

The problem with perspective is that I delude myself into seeing things a certain way. I'd known Sora less than two months when we were talking about love. He'd lived with me less than two weeks when he said "This is never going to work. We're impossible." And I held him, and told him he was wrong because I knew he was right, but that knowing the truth wasn't going to make either of us feel any better.

And do you see how giant Sora and the ocean are in this entry? Enormous, right? It's as though all of these things I'm finally going to write are going to be about our relationship, and how I got to this point where I was too baffled by our lives together to form a coherent sentence to describe it. I stopped blogging. I threw myself into so many men, I stopped naming them. I let all these emotions wash over me without committing them to paper because of Sora and ocean and...really, it's a false perspective. He's not nearly as important to my story as all these strung together sentences would lead you to believe. He's a dot on a horizon that's going to turn out to be driftwood. And I'll cling to him, untl I realize that all this time I've been able keep my head above water and still touch my feet to the ocean floor. I just couldn't see how shallow the water was around me, so focused on finding the shore as I was.