Teach Me How to Fly

I’m flying. My body is light with momentum, the wind is singing in my ears, the tar races past my feet. It barely feels like I’m touching the ground, even though my legs work to their full capacity.

My arms cut the air, giving my body additional momentum, my lungs pump the nightly air into my body in regular intervals. I’m a perfectly constructed machine. I am made for this.

I am locked in. There’s nothing on my mind but calm concentration. No adrenaline, no excitement, no fear. Just the wall ahead of me. My eyes never leave it as I race closer. I know just how much power it takes, where my feet need to go for just the right take-off.

Step, step, step.

My hands push against the top of the wall just as my left leg pushes off the ground and my right leg kicks upwards. And then I’m in the air, flying, rocketing forwards.

The world around me is a blur. Everything but the second wall. The second wall is in perfect focus, coming closer, closer, closer.

Once again, my hands slam into stone. But I don’t try to stop my momentum. I simply let the speed guide me on. Just as my hands lose contact, I give a push upwards, start a slight rotation that allows me to tuck my legs back underneath me as I descend to the grass behind.

I hit the ground in a crouch, guide my body into a roll, feel the ground against my back. And then I’m upright again, punching the air, screaming into the night.

The rush comes immediately. Adrenaline, excitement, pride, joy. I made it. I made it!

“You made it!” Henry shouts, jumping from the wall he’d been standing on to film the whole spectacle. His friendly embrace almost throws me to the ground all over.

“I told you tonight was the night,” I say with a grin.

He steps back and gives my back a light slap. “Good job, man.”

I try to get a glance at the display of his phone. “Did you get the video?”

“Let’s have a look,” he says and turns so we’re standing next to each other.

The video, it turns out, is great. It shows me running up and flying past him in a single blur of black clothing, like a ninja. So cool!

I jump a little. My heart is still racing. “You’ve got to send me that. Oh, wait until Mum sees that, she’s gonna have a freaking cardiac arrest!”

He laughs and puts away his phone.

I’m already turning around, the next objective in my sights.

“To the walls?” Henry asks and I nod.

“To the walls!”

That’s where we spend most of our nights out, Henry and I. On the walls. One of them, some of them, all of them. It’s not like they’re connected, even though they’re all roughly in the same area.

They’re mostly by the small harbour of this tiny coastal town. Almost all good spots are located there. Rails by the water, stairs, walls, chains if you’re feeling funky.

We leave at a jog. Why? Because it’s boring to move slowly. We’re here to have fun. We’re here to be fun.

We reach the walls only two minutes later. I wasn’t kidding when I said that this town is tiny. Henry doesn’t even stop, only speeds up and runs up the wall. Two steps against the stone, his hands grab the edge and the momentum is enough that he only barely has to push to get his body up. Then his legs kick back and as his hip leaves the wall, he tucks his knees in and his feet land on the edge. He gets up.

“Your turn!” he shouts, grinning.

I shake my head. I’ve had one major success today, I’m not setting myself up for failure.

So instead of sprinting, I jog up to the wall, do only a single step against it. It’s just enough to get my hands to the edge, where they can latch on. I take a moment to find my footing, then I pull myself up.

I’m not strong enough to do a muscle-up, of course. Even Henry can’t do one, and he is a lot stronger than me. So I pull myself up until my chin is past the edge, then place one forearm on top, then the other. Then I only have to push myself up and the last part, getting my feet on the edge, I can do just like Henry.

“Boooring!” Henry hoots next to me and I flip him off.

“Your Mum is boring.”

He laughs again. But it’s just his light laughter, not the hyaena-like screeching I’ve grown used to expect when something’s actually funny. “Fair enough.”

Slowly, we walk along the top of the wall, until we’re at the end of the street and the view of the sea opens up before us.

The night sky is clear and the moon is full. Even now I’m not cold out here, in spite of the slight breeze. But that’ll be gone in a week or two. The weather never stays nice for long.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Henry says, nodding his head in direction of the water.

I snort. “I hate it.” And even though I’m grinning, he knows that I’m at least somewhat serious.

He rolls his eyes. “Aaaaand we’re back to the same old.” He gives my shoulder a light nudge. “And anyway, didn’t you use to like the view?”

“I guess….” But that was when we were younger. And even then, I didn’t care much for this view I’ve seen almost every day for all of my life. It’s a view. Like any other. “But there’s just nothing to do here.”

Aside of parkour. And even that, we can’t do properly because this town is just too small. There are no big spots, fun challenges, there’s no community. We don’t even have our own cinema or shopping mall. Okay, both are only two bus stops away, but that’s already several kilometres and the buses drive every few hours at day and not at all at night.

And now there aren’t even any real challenges left around here. I just did the hardest jump I could possibly hope to achieve outside, out here, with the available walls, without actually breaking my neck. Sure, there are lots of jumps I’m theoretically strong or fast enough to do. But my head isn’t there yet and there’s no real way to work myself up to it. There are no proper gyms to train parkour. And without that….

That’s the hard part, really. The head. Controlling your mind to the point where you can temporarily control your fear. Building up the strength to catapult yourself head-first at a concrete wall isn’t hard. Gathering the courage to actually do it, outside, where there’s very little room for error, well, that’s a different story entirely.

“We could always take the bus, y’know?” Henry says, grinning. He’s not phased by my sudden mopiness. He hasn’t been in a long time. I like that about him. He’s always the same idiot, no matter what my mood is.

“You know exactly that parkour is only fun at night.” When nobody’s watching, when nobody calls the police because they’re a stuck-up boomer and don’t want you lounging on their balcony.

We’d make a great burglar team, Henry and I. But we never take anything. We do parkour for the achievements and for the thrill. And anyway, we only went up to that balcony twice. The first time to see whether we could actually do it and the second time to see how fast we could do it. In both cases we didn’t stay long.

I tap my foot. “We should switch walls,” I tell him and he nods.

“Sure. But you’re not-” He stops because he knows that there’s just no point.

I grin, salute him and jump. The fall takes very long for a fall. But I expect it to. I expect the way my stomach goes light and the way the wind rushes past me and the way I grow heavier and heavier, until I slam into the ground, balancing on the balls of my feet. There’s a slight sting in the skin there, but apart from that it feels fine, really. Okay, yes, I definitely feel it in my knees. This slight heaviness as I push back up and grin at Henry from below.

There’s a reason why I do this. I do it because he can’t. Or because he doesn’t dare. Taking jumps from this high – approximately three metres with a concrete walkway underneath – isn’t exactly easy to commit to. It’s also really not good for your knees, especially if you don’t do a safety roll afterwards, but my knees somehow got used to it.

“You smug little shit!”

He takes the safe route, sitting on the edge of the wall, grabbing onto the top of a street sign and pushing off once he has the metal to hold on to. The sign shakes violently, I’m still waiting for the day he manages to break one of these.

We only have to swap to the other side of the road from there. This time, I give him a boost, he climbs up and pulls me after him. He’s heavier than me, I don’t know whether I could pull him up, so we never really tried. It seems easy enough for him, though. He puts his hand around my wrist and I put mine around his and he just lifts me off my feet. I can practically walk up the rough stone and only have to fight a little to make it to the top of the wall.

This one’s narrower. It’s not like we have to balance or anything, but we do have to pay attention to the placement of our feet. At this height, you really don’t want to take an uncontrolled fall. The lights in the large house to our right are turned off. I think it’s some sort of event location. I could probably just google it, but that would take away the fun of speculation, wouldn’t it?

In front of me, Henry goes into a crouch and climbs onto the heavy metal gate. He only stays there for a moment before placing his feet on one of the parallel bars a little further down so he won’t have to balance. How boring.

I wait until he’s made it across, then I step onto the gate. There’s exactly two things in parkour I can do better than Henry: balancing and taking drops. Well, to be honest, I’m pretty sure he can do both those things to at least about my level. But he’s too cautious to. He doesn’t want to risk injury. Which is honestly cute with all the stunts he pulls the rest of the time.

I love being the reckless one. I love having that reputation. Much better than being ‘the lanky kid’ I used to be. Now, people actually want me on their team in school. I can run, I can jump, I don’t get tired quickly. The only thing I’m garbage at is throwing. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

I’m already looking forward to showing off to all the people that used to give me shit for my thin arms. Even though they’ve probably all forgotten about it by now. We’ve got a good community at school, which is just as well, since it’s single track. Not enough children for anything more out here.

Slowly, I take my second foot off the wall behind me. Immediately, I feel my heartbeat slow and the world around me narrows to the width of the metal beneath my feet. I don’t have my arms out. I do know how I’d have to use them to balance properly, but I don’t. Because I like to show off. My breathing is slow and measured. I’m aware of every heartbeat. This is living. A grin spreads the corners of my mouth. I’m in the middle now and I stop and slowly raise my eyes to look at Henry.

His silhouette is dark against the night sky. The next streetlight is too far away to illuminate him properly. Now the sky is pretty.

Suddenly my vision fizzes. My senses go numb and the world around me tilts. I barely have time to wonder why I’m growing dizzy before I know that I’m too far off balance to put myself right again.

The gate I was standing on is lower than the wall I’d jumped off before. But this is different. It’s like jumping blindly. Impossible to balance. Impossible to see the impact coming. I manage to get my feet underneath me, tense my legs. Then the ground crashes into my heels and I fall over onto my side.

I grunt. That was unpleasant.

Henry appears in my field of vision, leans down to me, says something.

I grunt again.

“I’m fine.”

Slowly, the fog clears away and I feel a throbbing in my left ankle. Fuck. Please don’t be broken.

Carefully, I roll up my joggers, shift my weight so I can see it in the light of the next streetlight. No swelling or colouration just yet.

The flashlight from Henry’s phone briefly blinds me, then I feel his cool touch against my ankle, gently tracing the bones. The touch doesn’t hurt.

“Doesn’t look broken,” he mumbles.

I hum in agreement. The pain’s already fading a little.

“We should still call it a night at this point,” he says and sits down on the ground next to me. Probably to wait until I feel ready to try getting up so he can help me get back home.

That’s the problem with showing off. If you mess up, it gets ugly.