Hanging By A Thread

"Get me down! NOW! NOWWWW!" I screamed as my life was literally hanging by a thread from a three-storey-high wall. Through half-shut eyes, I caught a glimpse of people walking by under me, looking like Lego people, tiny miniature people walking on the ground, reminding me that it's quite a long way to fall from where I was hanging.

Up until that point, I never thought I had a problem with vertigo. When I first fell in love with wall-climbing, I thought I was going to, in time, climb my way up the Rocky Mountain without breaking a sweat. Now I'm not so sure.

After I was belayed down to safety, my heart still pounding hard from the near-death experience, my boyfriend, stunned by my intense reaction, asked, "What happened?"

"I was scared shitless, that's what happened." But if you think that that is going to stop me from going up that wall again, you just don't know me at all.

Introducing, the biggest scaredy-cat who's always overestimating the guts that she has (which if translated into physical mass is smaller than whatever's hanging on the belly of Taylor Swift) and only realizes her lack of balls once she reaches the point of no return, in this case, being suspended 15m of the ground.

The route looks easy and it just kills me that I wasn't able to reach for that hold, placed strategically so that it is just about 2 cm out of my grasp. If only I was just 2 cm taller…. The forth time I tried, I decided to use another approach, which was to aim for the feature in the wall, that's curiously shaped like a part of a female genitalia. Bad move. My fingers just couldn't hold on to the feature long enough for me to make my next move. Four times being hurled violently mid-air like some crash-test dummy was enough to turn me into a puddle of acrophobia.

Since my fingers were already shaking out of fatigue, and vertigo had the best of me, I relented and decided to switch places with my boyfriend.

Off he went.

He was doing pretty well. I was cheering for him, trying to be the supportive girlfriend even though my inside was screaming just how unfair it was that the 20 cm height difference between us makes all the difference as he was easily able to reach for holds after holds. We are so competitive it’sa wonder we haven’t eaten each other’s heads off by now.

At 80˚ angle, the wall is actually leaning towards the ground. Though it is unnoticeable by the naked eyes, once you are trying to scale up the wall, the slight slant of the wall would make you feel as if the gravity force acting to pull you down has doubled, even tripled.

Then, suddenly, he too crumbled at the hand of the evil spirit of the wall, as his hands and his legs, no longer able to fight against the force of nature, slipped from the artificial rocks. I was having my heads lost up in the clouds about 5 seconds prior to that but the effect was already evident, when he plummeted about 2 meters from the higher spot on the wall since I didn’t tightened the safety rope as he climbed up.

Poor 7-year-old kid was the victim of my carelessness when my boyfriend accidentally kicked him in the head on his way down during the sudden drop. It wasn’t a kick in the actual sense, more like my boy’s legs coming into contact with the kid’s helmet, without a serious impact. Nevertheless, it’s a good thing kids were required to wear helmets there. The scrawny, geeky kid screamed rather dramatically, so that the entire hall could hear him “ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME?”

“No, but next time I will,” my boyfriend muttered under his breath.

The kid proceeded to crawl all the way to the end of the room, only got up on his legs when he was sure that he was well away from all danger. He shot us a dirty look.

“You know, this is nothing compared to bungee-jumping…” my boyfriend pointed out in a rather sarcastic tone. Deep inside, I knew he was happy that I turned out to not to be so indifferent to heights after all, since that means there’s a chance that he wouldn’t be dragged into accompanying me to take a 200m plunge with only a rope tight to our legs that’s keeping us from crossing over to the side where the deads are. Bungee-jumping has long been on top of my to-do-list and he has never approved of it because ‘you jump, I jump’ was part of the deal.

“No way. No friggin way. I’m crossing it out of my list. In fact, I’m crossing it out of my mental list right now. There. Crossed. Scrawled over. And over. The only way I was going to bungee-jump after this is if someone drags me to the jumping platform and pushes me over.”

I could sense him smiling from ear-to-ear from inside.