It is not a safe place.
I'm not normally one for exploring too far but there was this meadow I used to cycle to with Lorna on those eternally warm summer days in between finishing school and starting college, that was the first time in my life I'd felt completely free. I had no schoolwork, a part time job I loved in a record shop (that gave me the most disposable income I've ever enjoyed before or since) and nothing to do but plan picnics, teach myself how to smoke, and laze around with Lorna discussing boys, and tv shows (sometimes both; especially in regards to Queer As Folk and how it made us strangely aroused to see two guys fucking each other's brains out). Those few months have taken on an ethereal glow in my memory; draped as they are in sunlight, the smell of rollies, and the feel of wild grass tickling my neck as I daydreamed hours and hours of my life away. It was as close to perfect as I'd ever experienced.
It must have been on one of those meadow picnic trips when I finally stumbled across the little overgrown rocky path that lead off the back of the meadow towards a wall of imposing and beautifully solid trees. As I said, I'm not one for adventure really, but maybe Lorna had said something that had upset me and I'd decided to take a wander rather than tell her how insensitive she was being (confrontation remains one of my least favourite activities, though I've got steadily better at it as time has passed). Stinging nettles resolutely planted themselves in the soil on either side of the path which made it quite difficult to see but once I had tread delicately through them, careful not to make contact with the bare skin of my legs, it opened out and I was able to stroll confidently along through this glen that offered shade and the distant sound of bees buzzing from flower to flower. The fact there was a path at all suggested others had come across this place before and tread the ground down to offer a safe passage though but in all my years of going there I've never encountered another single soul that I hadn't invited along for the ride myself (if I was slightly less pragmatic I'd think there was a kind of universe time-share system operating that ensured only one person or group at a time was able to find it but this seems unlikely). As I got to the other side of the glen, sunlight and warmth suddenly broke through and I found myself stood on a patch of mossy grassland next to a small ravine. This is when I first saw the rope bridge located about 10 foot downstream of where I was standing. On the other side stood another impossibly deep wall of trees and as I have no sense of direction I wasn't sure what could possibly lay beyond it, what it was connecting to, or why it was there. I felt like it was one of those important moments that you want to remember forever so you start taking a note of your surroundings. The smells and sounds and sights. I tend to live in my head a lot of the time so every now and again make a concerted effort to remain conscious in the present moment. It seemed like there was rushing water nearby but as the ravine's stream was nothing more than a trickle, I wasn't entirely convinced that wasn't just the leaves of the trees rustling to the front and back of me. I could hear birds twittering all around me. I made no effort to walk towards the bridge but sat down briefly on the scratchy grass that lay beneath my feet and breathed in the smell of earth and sun before slowly wandering back the way I had come.
When I showed the bridge to Lorna on a later date she'd rushed towards it and set off to the other side while I trailed behind frightened of falling in or it not taking my weight. I remember being angry with myself for showing it to her because of course she'd be brave and need to see what was on the other side. I was happy to have just found the thing and look it at from afar. 'Come on!' she'd cried. 'It's fine, look!' I smiled and waved her on, hating myself for being too cautious all the time. She galloped away and disappeared through the wall of trees until I heard her suddenly gasp. She just as suddenly appeared again and ran back towards me with an intensity in her eyes I'd never seen before. 'Seriously, you need to come over to the other side. This is going to blow your mind' I shook my head slowly and grimaced, 'No way man, you're not getting me on that thing'. I said this with an American accent like I was a character in some schlocky movie to lighten the situation but I'd meant what I had said. No way, no how. She grunted in frustration and ran off again. 'Suit yourself!' she called. I turned around defiantly and made my way back to the meadow, waiting for at least two hours in increasingly angry silence before realising she wasn't coming back. For some reason this didn't worry me as I struggled to wheel our two bicycles and picnic detritus home. I grumbled and cursed her under my breath the entire way for leaving me to clear up her mess and take care of her stuff. It never occurred to me to either just leave her bike there or be concerned for her safety. I knew she was ok. She was more than ok, she was doing what I couldn't.
That was probably one of the last times I saw her in a friendship capacity. College started and we drifted off and were absorbed into different social groups (her - the pretty clubbing types, me - the freaks and geeks). We never really discussed that day in any great detail and she never told me what lay on the other side of the bridge but there was something irrevocably broken in our relationship; she had jumped out of the nest, suddenly ready to fly. I was still sheltered and too frail to consider taking such actions. We would chat of course, should our paths cross as we wandered between classes and the cafeteria, and smile and nod and agree oh yes we really should meet up properly soon I will call you but neither of us ever bothered. There was no point. She had a knowledge I didn't and neither of us were comfortable with that.
It wasn't until a couple of years later that I thought about that place again. It was an unseasonably warm day in May and I suddenly got the urge to revisit this specific little hidey hole of my past, so packed a picnic and excitedly told my boyfriend of the time (who, four years later would turn out to be gay, making mine and Lona's breathless description of homosexual sex a little less exotic and erotic to me forever more) that we were about to embark on a 'great adventure'. He seemed unsure but followed me along the winding country lanes that led to the meadow while I chattered inanely about the days Lorna and I had shared out here. When we got to the meadow we enjoyed our lunch of French bread, sliced meats and old English cider and lolled around, making out as our bellies swollen with food rubbed against each other, coming up for air every now and again and to pick stay hair strands (mostly mine) out of our mouths. Eventually the alcohol and sun got to my head and a wave of bravery overtook me. 'Come with me' I ordered as I stood up and started walking towards the nettle laden path entrance. My boyfriend followed without much question and we walked in near silence though the glen until the bridge appeared before me, just as suddenly as the last time I was here. 'I going to walk over that' I said out loud. Not so much to him but to myself, ensuring that a pact was made between me and the universe. One that I couldn't shimmy out of.
The first step on the bridge was tentative and I felt it start to bow under my weight. I debated stepping back off it to collect my thoughts but knew that if I did this I would lose my nerve completely so, even more tentatively, placed my right foot in front of my left. I did this again and again until I had reached the other side. The hard ground surprised me as I had resolutely not looked down all the way over (the ravine was narrow and not that high - six foot by twelve maybe? High enough that it would hurt to fall, though probably not lethal; and wide enough that you wouldn't be able to grab hold of the sides if you were in the middle and the bridge decided to release itself from its tethers). I stood there for a second with this dawning realisation of how deeply I was breathing and suddenly starting to wake up to the sounds and smells and sights around me. My boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder and startled me back into the present moment completely. This was an adventure and I was glad he was with me. We walked into the trees (which up close was a little less wall-like but still fairly dense) and quite suddenly found ourselves standing on the edge of a deep drop into a watery abyss.
'Shall we?' I asked.
'Shall we what?' he countered.
'Jump!'
'Go ahead if you want to'
'Are you not coming'
'Ha!'
And I don't know what it was; the adrenaline from making it so far, my lightheaded combination of cider, sun and kissing, but I took a little run up and flew into the air and then kept falling and falling till I felt my toes, then legs, then body make contact with the water. It hurt a little and I had a brief seconds panic of not knowing which way was up but I soon bobbed to the surface, laughing manically. I could make out my boyfriend's figure at the top, shaded black against the sunlight but wasn't too concerned about him. I swam around and luxuriated in the warmth of the water and my own sense of daring. I could do these things. I did do these things. I was a golden god! (Of course this feeling somewhat dissipated as found myself with scrapped knees and bloody fingertips as I struggled to climb up the almost-sheer rock face; which may be a slight exaggeration but it was definitely bloody hard). When I reached the top my boyfriend was nowhere to be seen and I finally realised that what I had thought of as Lorna's rejection of me because I wasn't free and brave like her was probably anger that I'd left her to make her own way home after climbing out of a lagoon with no climbing equipment. I smiled to myself at the solipsist impulses of teenagers and trudged back to the meadow where luckily he was still patiently waiting being much more of a gentleman and friend than I have ever been to anyone.
Subsequently I would occasionally take the guys I was dating to this little secluded meadow spot that was great for kissing and talking in the afternoon summer sun. Sometimes I would show them the bridge, sometimes not. A couple were even daring enough to walk across to the other side with me and peer helplessly down at the drop below. No one ever offered to jump with me though, even the ones that said they loved me. The itch to do so again still stayed with me but having done it alone once was enough. I knew I could do it if I wanted to now and I wanted to find the person that would follow me and help me climb out (and vice versa). Doing something like that alone was important but I knew it would be more sensible (in a sense), more fun and much easier with someone else. So I secretly tested them in my head; if these guys loved me or cared for me like they said they did they would have offered to jump I had decided. Because they sat impassively back it meant they weren't really in this thing. It was all for show. They talked the talk without walking the walk (or, in this case, jumping the jump).
Then I met him.
He was different to everyone else I'd ever met from the start. We'd met when I was hungover and tired and didn't feel that I was wearing quite the right outfit for an evening in the pub (black knee length dress with a deep 'v' neck that put my breasts a little too prominently on display, biker boots, thick belt, make up a little too pink) but I immediately felt comfortable with him in a way that I don't normally feel with new people. We arranged to meet again and again and slowly but surely I realised I had met someone whose weird fit my weird perfectly (I don't mean that in a dirty way, but if you're going to read it as such then that side of it was pretty darn perfect too). Here was this imperfect yet delightful creature that had grown up and developed completely independent of my existence and yet whose imperfections tessellated with mine in such a way that I could never have imagined possible.
What's funny about meeting someone like this is that not that you suddenly 'get' song lyrics or poetry like everyone says you will but you understand why things happened the way they did much more clearly than before. It puts everything into context; I had to not fit certain people in certain ways (even though that hurts like hell at the time - why... can't we get along/doesn't he like me like that/does he make me feel like that?) in order to appreciate just how special this particular man actually is.
The relationship itself unfolded at its own pace. For the first time ever I wasn't in a rush to define anything, to say 'I love you', to hear 'I love you'... I knew that it would all happen eventually and I was happy to just sit back and let it play out the way it needed to. But it was maybe three months in and I decided to take him to the drop. I kept telling myself that this wasn't a test, that if I was testing him slightly it wasn't fair to do it so that he didn't even know, that no matter what happened I still liked him loads and he felt the same way about me.
But I knew this would determine everything.
The meadow was as quiet as ever and we sat there for hours talking and smoking, just as I had with Lorna all those years ago. When the sun stated to dip a little lower I found my nerve and lead him to the path, through the glen, over the bridge, and to the drop. We hardly spoke a word all the way. As we stared down together he looked up at me, made eye contact and sort of nodded.
Together we jumped.
