every marching band hero

Build the parachute as you’re falling, right? This is what we’re doing. We’re terrified–we learn how to be, all the time, terrified. 

I’m thinking first of plumes. These were the feather accents on the hat of every marching band hero. Decorative, uniform embellishment. Evil, sadistic nonsense. 

The most inane bit of high school suffering–and I wore one atop my head every Memorial Day for four years. I played the flute, and man. I played the flute so badly. 

But hey. We build the parachute as we’re falling, and we learn to make a joke about it. We learn to laugh at our heads before the feather pokes our eyes out.

We adapt to the feeling of falling.

We’re made to build the parachute as we’re falling, and what’s more, to build it with what now appears to be a gum wrapper. 

But what now? When we are too old or too sincere to make a joke about it. When the illusion of safety shatters–when we are completely exposed in our inability to slow down. What then?

Like now, see. We’re staring down the effects of irreversible damage. The world will look impossibly different in ten years–in ways that are terrifying and in ways that look a lot like an ending.

I am a dramatic, sentimental bitch, but it isn’t poetic bullshit when I say the ocean is burning. 

Dear reader, we aren’t building a parachute anymore. We’re just plain falling. 

I’ll abandon the metaphor here, though this is consistently how I feel. I’ll leave it because it isn’t helpful–intense fear leads (me at least) to inaction and to despair. I don’t really know what a writer’s (let alone a mediocre peanut butter girl’s) place is in this conversation.

To make an unhelpful metaphor about how we as a species adapt to the feeling of falling–to the feeling of panic? This isn’t helpful, and I hesitate to call it art. But this is how it feels right? Just falling and knowing the ground is there but not being able to quite make it out. 

I don’t know if there is an uplifting edge to this thought. Something about plumes I think–about how we wear it well. Like, we have to, right?

We have to live through this fear, because what else is there? It’s absolutely ridiculous–all of this. It’s silly and devastating and unavoidable. It’s heartbreaking but.

We wear it anyway.

Something like that.

I love you. So much.

-A