Into the blue

As I passed the tops of the highest trees, I could feel myself rising faster. The ground was now so far below that looking down was disturbing; even though I told myself falling couldn't hurt me, the fear was impossible to shake.

There didn't seem to be anything I could do, so I let myself drift into a position where I felt as if I was floating in a swimming pool. I wasn't going so fast that the sky appeared to move, so it didn't feel too strange to be looking up.

I tried to think where I'd seen that view before - the pavement one side, the lower path far below - as I'd risen over the bridge. But nothing came to me. Frustrated, I focused on the patch of blue I could see between the clouds, trying to clear my mind.

I winced, thinking that the awful phrase "blue sky thinking" seemed, at last, to actually mean something.

Words and thoughts came randomly to me: a scene from the film I'd watched with Kate, where the doctor had talked about "highly organized hallucinations, comparable to an experience of real life"; lyrics from a song...It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round; the tears in Jen's eyes when she'd said the words "Goodbye, Alan".

But it was when my mind replayed Lewis saying, "those few seconds before your brain catches up with the idea that you're dead" that I realised with a jolt when I'd seen the top of the bridge before.



Story begins here.