When I was fourteen, my wish came true. For about a year, I had wished as hard as I could, every single day, to be able to Force Jump. For what seemed like hours, I'd stand in the driveway and try to jump up to the balcony outside my room, easily twice my height above the asphalt. One cloudy Thursday afternoon, it worked. I focused all my willpower on reaching the edge of the railing, hunched down, and launched myself further than I had hoped. I landed on the roof, and surprised, I couldn't keep my footing. I tumbled down the edge and fell onto the porch. My mother got home about a half hour later and drove me to the hospital. I had broken an arm, and I was grounded for a month.
A couple days later, I got out of the hospital. I was the big thing around school for about twenty-four hours. The crazy kid who had climbed up onto his roof and fallen. I enjoyed the attention, and when it started to fade I got careless. I told a girl I had a crush on, Laura, what had actually happened. She laughed for what seemed like days, and rushed off to tell her friends. Red-faced, I ran out of the school and into an adjacent field. I hadn't tried to jump since the successful attempt, and this time, filled with embarrassment, I jumped even further. I landed near a half-dozen grazing cows, and somehow my legs absorbed the impact without a problem. The cows looked up, surprised, but after a moment went back to chewing their cuds. I jumped several more times that day, and started to get better at it.
I was in my early thirties now, and had become a successful young architect. My high school long jump record still held. I exercised every day, but I would only jump on Sundays, my "alone-time day." My abilities had surpassed my wildest teenage dreams; I could now jump nearly a mile and land utterly unscathed. I had a girlfriend, Nadia, whom I had been seeing for almost two years. I hadn't told anyone since Laura. I don't know where Nadia thought I went those days. On a good Sunday I could jump to the peak of a local mountain, scan the landscape, and take off in a random direction, jumping again and again until I was in another state, almost devoid of fatigue. It was difficult to gauge where I would land until I began to descend. Once I was in the air I had very little control, but at this point in my life I was extremely familiar with the landscape for hundreds of miles.
On this particular Sunday, I woke up around six, careful not to stir Nadia, made a cup of coffee, and stretched. At seven, I set my empty mug down on a patio table and scanned my surroundings. No one was looking. I jumped, aiming near the peak of a nearby butte, where no one would be at this hour. Twenty seconds later, I landed, a cloud of dust rising at my feet to mark the beginning of the day's journey. I looked around, considering where to go next, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure in the sky growing closer. I focused on it.
It was a human, flying through the sky. As it got nearer, I saw that it was a woman. She landed in her own cloud of dust, crouched down, her dark hair wild from the wind. As she rose, my heart rose to my throat and I could barely croak out my disbelief.
"Nadia?"