T-minus 10 and counting.

I’m eight years old again. My mother told me not to jump from the tree house.

“Stevie! You better come down here pronto!”

I saw her skirt waving in the wind, her hair whipping around her face like cotton candy at the fair.

“10 seconds and counting, or… no dessert!”

She was scared. So was I, but the beating of my heart pushed me to do something daring, something wild. I was too young to know that this is what intoxication felt like, an adrenaline surge that I have chased every day since.

Mom never knew I was designed to defy gravity.

So, I jumped.

 

T-minus 8 and counting.

I’m twenty-eight years old. The rush, the fear, the intoxication floods my adult circuits. My body goes through the motions as I have during all the simulations. I am strapped in, ready to launch, only to discover that I am back in that treehouse. My mind is counting the seconds before I leap. Cape Canaveral is gone and I’m wearing a Superman cape. I’m a child strapped in a chair, soon to be hurtling through space.

Am I ready?

I notice my terror reflected on the computer display is identical to my mother’s. My heart, always steady in training, beats faster. It knows how it feels to fail, to fall, to break, to suffer. Gravity’s a cruel teacher.

The memory of that treehouse is a stone around my neck.

“Steve, your heart rate is 150. You ok in there?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

 

T-minus 4 and counting.

Eight years old and broken.

Dr. Adams towers over me, scribbling on his clipboard. Looking everywhere but at me.

“Well, son, it appears you’ll be grounded for the next few months,” said Dr. Adams. No one laughed. My tears had run dry. My wheelchair was embarrassing. My casts were enormous. The pain, no one asked about my pain.

After our last visit, when he removed my casts, he handed me a lollipop and a comic book.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. My legs, white and spindly like lollipop sticks.

“Study hard, Stevie, there are safer ways a boy can fly.”

That doc had set my bones and planted a seed. I was eighteen when I learned how to fly. I try now to imagine myself in a jet cockpit, just like times past. Dog fights and speeding through radar zones, but my mind keeps going back to that damn treehouse. The moment fear thrust me forward, rather than back. Back to the summer I read superhero and astronaut comics hiding under my sheets. The summer when Dad tore down the treehouse.

“Your papa’s not raising a dang fool. You hear me, son?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

 

T-minus 2 and counting.

But I’m not eight anymore. I try to calm the beats that could abort this mission, the rising panic, the memory of searing pain as both feet land and crack simultaneously.

“Why did you try to fly, son?”

I still don’t know the answer to that question. The need to hurtle myself at speeds not known to man. To risk my life in a way that seems hard wired into my very DNA. The answer is then as it is now.

Because I am meant to.

My heart begins to slow. My body relaxes into the pulsing power that resonates around me. Instead of complying with gravity, I will break its bonds. Do what I couldn’t all those years earlier….

“We have liftoff!”

Now, I’m eight again… I don’t fly… I soar.