365. Epilogue/Engagement...

Yes I can count and if you can too then you’ll have realised that the Challenge is short by one. They say you should leave the best till last so that’s what I’ve done although it’s not particularly in order.

From what I wrote about the skydive, you may have gathered that it was singularly the most exhilarating experience I’ve had in my life. I really wanted to share that with Isla and, as I intimated, words on a page just don’t do it justice so I was left with the arduous task of persuading her to accede to doing another one with me so she could truly understand the sensations I’d been ranting about.

Not one to shy away from a challenge normal, she had a zero tolerance policy for sky diving and it took more than a little pressure and coercion to make her relent. Initially she said she would come to the drop zone and then decide but when we arrived she found out that I’d already booked in and there was going to be no backing out. I was delighted when she agreed but it was with the caveat of “I’m doing this for you, not for me!” I didn’t really care about that I just wanted her to get in the plane and face her fears while also engaging in something I felt was life changing.

It took about 3 hours before our drop number was called and as then minutes wore on she became more and more insular. I’d catch her out of the corner of my eye breathing deeply, ashen faced and wondered if she would actually go through with it. She was introduced to Mike, her tandem-master, about 30 minutes before the jump and he tried to talk her down from her increasing state of anxiety but without much luck. Bizarrely, he was originally from the UK and it turned out that him and I had gone to the same primary school and our gassing about people we both knew and places we’d lived saw her standing on her own getting more and more worked up.

By the time we got on the Sky-Van (a veritable flying bus much larger in scale that the narrow plane I’d jumped from last time) she was whiter than white and looked a fraction away from passing out. As the “air-bus” took off bad went to worse and Isla became completely silent. The banter and jokes that the ‘divers took part in shook her up visibly instead of having the claming effect that everyone else was enjoying and all the while I was helpless to make her feel any better. She was in her own little world of trepidation and was going to have to find her way out herself.

“Don’t worry,” I mouthed, “I’ll be right behind you the whole way down.” A fractured smile and a brief nod of her head was her reply

By 10,000 feet I was sure she had reached the end of her tether but at 14,000 she somehow managed to stand up, allow herself to be strapped to Mike and walk her way to the open door at the back of the plane. Seconds later she was hurtling towards the Earth with me a few meters behind grinning at her success. The trajectory I was on allowed me to watch her for her entire fall right up until her chute opened. The bloke I was strapped to opened ours a millisecond later and temporarily she could see me over to her right and waved before they tacked left. She looked… relieved!

The fact that we opened our parachute later than her and that my tandem-master and I both like our pies meant that we reached the ground a good minute before Isla did and I had plenty of time to get out the harness and watch her land. With tears fuelled by a thankfulness that she was on solid ground, we hugged for ages. “Well done,” I said, “You see what I mean now?” With a questioning look on her face and a shrug of her shoulders she replied, “I don’t remember anything from being in the plane till the chute opened!”

“What!?!”

“I just remember being petrified one minute and the next minute the canopy was open above me,” she continued matter of factly, “I’ve forgotten everything in between already.”

“Well,” I said, pulling the ring from my pocket and getting down on one knee in the middle of the drop zone, “Hopefully you’ll not forget this.” I pushed the ring onto her finger and said, “I’ll always be right behind you. Isla will you marry me?”

With tear of joy streaming down her face (well I like to think they were tears of joy but she was a bit of an emotional wreck by that point so who knows) she said, “Yes!” We hugged for what seemed like ages with other skydivers landing all around us and then we slowly walked back to the office buildings to break the news to our friends.

So that’s it. The Challenge is over but there still is a whole life-time of challenges ahead for the two us now. What that future holds is uncertain but one thing is sure – I now have a partner in crime for all my prospective adventures, and as with this skydive I don’t think I’ll ever have to push her out of any metaphorical planes.

THE END…
…FOR NOW!