Jump

By Anchita Jayaprakash Narayan

There are nights when the rope feels alive beneath your soles, humming with the memory of every choice you never made. You stand there, a small animal of habit and terror, listening to the old sermon your mind recites: Do not jump. Do not risk. Do not loosen the grip. The words are polite and steady; they become the scaffolding of a life lived in halves, teaching your muscles to stay tense and your thoughts to wait for catastrophe.

Imagine, for a second, that the abyss isn’t an absence but an accusation — a black mirror reflecting every tiny failure until it looks like a cliff. Your hands go numb around the pole because you have learned to believe in the weight of possibility as punishment. So you stay, and the rope becomes a stage of endless rehearsal: perfectly poised, rehearsed, never performed. Each breath is a calculation, each heartbeat a ledger of debts you owe to safety.

Fear has its own architecture. It builds rooms inside you where light is not allowed, rooms furnished with “what if” and “if only.” You learn to live in their dimness; you hang curtains of precaution so thick they blot out the sun. Yet the rooms only grow. They are roomy enough for regret, warm enough for shame, and convincingly real.

But what if the rope is a joke, and the ground is patient? What if gravity — banal, ordinary, patient — awaits you with no malice at all? To think the ground will break you is a romance you’ve been feeding, a dramatization of danger to make safety seem heroic. Yet there is cruelty in safety’s disguise, too. To insist on it forever is to let life soften into an anecdote about fear. You forget the absence of falling because you have become intimate with the posture of holding on.

So you stand there, perpetually mid-air — neither landing nor leaping — suspended in an exhausted theatrics of potential ruin. The world below becomes a rumor, imagined savage. Disaster is rehearsed as armor, rehearsal as a shield.

And yet — there is another logic. Perhaps when you let go, you will not break but arrive. The body beneath the story of fear remembers solidity: the press of foot on ground, the stubborn miracle of balance returning. The fall, if it is a fall, might be the most honest act you have left: a relinquishing of the myths you invented about your limits. It might bruise you; it might teach you new shapes. It might open a pocket of ordinary life where breath is not taxied by terror.

By Anchita Jayaprakash Narayan