Butterfly In The Sky...

And so the cannon has fired. Presently my body is rocketing up into the atmosphere, with the heat at my feet cooling the farther I get from the ground. The air is screaming past my ears, my eyes are two bugged-out planets, and my stomach feels like it's still in the cannon. 

This was all intentional.

And now is when it gets difficult.

All my life I have been packing black powder into that cannon below, and at the same time I've been building myself a wing-suit for when that spent powder brought me up to where I felt I needed to go.

I'm up there now. I'm up here now.

I woke up this morning and realized that that's where I am: I am hitting the moment where I will find out if my invention can hold and sustain flight, or if I will crash back into the ocean.

Source: @Earth_Pics

But right now it's the atmosphere and my wing-suit. I still have a bit of control, but it ain't much, and I'm still trying to figure out that part of it myself. 

At the age of 12 I fully realized that I needed to be a writer (I don't know how it happened, only that it did). But I also realized that I'm not a hyper-genius, so I would have to work myself to exhaustion if I ever wanted to create beauty like the beauty that so inspired me. And I did just that—worked myself to exhaustion.

After college, I went to work as a proofreader because I had been relatively unimpressed with my university education, which made Grad School seem like one of the most expensive jokes in the world, and conversely I didn't want to write about peach pie recipes for a magazine that was about to go bankrupt, so I reasoned to myself that until I truly developed my literary abilities, I simply couldn't have the artistic autonomy necessary to avoid having this thing I love so much—writing—feel like something I was cruelly whoring out.

But six years later my proofreading decision left me feeling like I set out to be the pilot and ended up being the person who handled the airplane's sewage.

(So many metaphors!)

Now, I've been blasted out of a cannon, and instead of trying to pilot a plane via traditional publishing, I'm in a wing-suit and on a prayer that this crazy thing I invented myself can fly twice as high and be even more liberating than the options that existed before.

It has a (fairly low) chance of working. And what possibly helps is that, although they're both blue, it should soon be very easy to figure out if I'm ultimately bound for the ocean or the sky.

We'll see.

It's all very exciting, but Jesus Christ am I terrified.