The Cliff

The wind pulls against my hair, the coppery strands which fell out of my tight ponytail whipping and dancing around my face. Elizabeth goes over the rules, but I am hardly listening, just waiting for a chance to peer over the edge of the cliff. I walk tentatively over, itching to lie down and take one look. Briahn lies down by the edge of the cliff while I check around to see if everybody thinks that that's ok, and Rachel and Abby and I go to join her while Sloan hugs the cliff close to the edge too. I peer over the cliff, and the wind whips my hair. I feel that familiar feeling of vertigo that makes me want to scream, and then throw up over the edge, partially to see what would happen, and then laugh. I'm not really actually afraid of heights. There are a couple, although not very many things that I am seriously afraid of, and a lot of things that I am partially afraid of, but about heights I say that I'm "rationally afraid" because if anybody was peering over the edge of a cliff, who wouldn't be a little scared. I also believe that i'm not scared of heights; I'm scared of falling. But sitting there, with my hair blowing around my face, 3 inches away from falling off a cliff, I realized that I might even like fear, reasonably. You just have to ignore it, and it gives you something to think about besides whats happened that day, or who you're mad at, whether they're lying next to you or all the way back in Denver, or somewhere else entirely. And the view from the top of that cliff was really great.