She wasn't afraid of falling. For as long as she could remember she had been jumping - always plummeting. She understood the laws of nature: no matter how high she climbed, gravity would always carry her back to the ground; gravity would always grant her momentum to fall and wind-resistance to float. She understood why birds had wings and humans didn't; it was because humans would just as soon leave, and they belonged on the ground. They always called her a little sparrow, always trying to fly, but they never understood that she didn't want updrafts or wings, she only wanted to scale walls and scurry up trees, to test the limits. She wanted to throw herself from rooftops and swan dive from balancing bars, challenging inertia and gravity and the laws of motion. She wanted to cannonball into puddles and see if the ocean caught her, or if she merely fell through the earth to the steaming, bubbling core. She wanted to lift up her arms in triumph, her hair whipping around her face, and fall through the clouds so that she knew what it felt like to be a tiny raindrop: descending - proving that everything, even her, returned to the ground. She wanted to test mass times acceleration and belly-flop into two inches of snow, leaving little pieces of her everywhere: slivers of bone, strands of hair, and tiny indentations in the ice that looked like fallen angels. She wanted to climb to the top of the tallest tree and look down; to gaze with eagle eyes at the miniscule world beneath her, and feel larger than life.
Mariana, 18.