I’ve always thought the end of the world would sound a little bit like thunder. Thunder as the ground splits open and swallows up cities and farms and rush hour traffic. Thunder as we run like a crowd of particularly crazed sheep away from the floor that falls behind us like it does in movies. Edge of your seat action, the end of the world. Imagine my surprise to find that the end of the world sounds a lot like birds chirping and a bunch of moms in minivans dropping their kids off for soccer practice. It sounds like a park in the middle of a California winter—sweaty, cloudless, and completely unremarkable.

Sitting in my car, a book of P.B. Shelley’s poetry in hand, I thought about the choice I had to make. The book, pages so thin that they tear if you look at them too hard, sat open in my lap, lines of obsessive neon pink highlighter illuminating Shelleyan hope. Hope? When you’re going for your Ph.D. in English, there is no hope. At least that’s how I felt, sitting in my car and hearing the approach of the end of the world: three twenty-five page papers due in five weeks. It might sound relatively easy, but we’re not talking about your bullshit high school papers that masquerade as original thought and quote huge passages with hopes of filling up that three page quota. We’re talking about page after page of literary theory and ideas that you have to pull, screaming, out of your hands and slap down on paper, pasted with blood and hours upon hours of time spent reading, time you will never get back. This kind of scholarship makes you hurt. It makes you sweat in your bed and before a room full of students all politely inquisitive about how if Milton’s Satan is a terrorist, then by extension, so is God.

There is nothing easy about it.

Despite this, it was never about ability. The question never was, “Can I do it?” Because the answer to that is, “Of course I fucking can.” I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I have a summa cum laude degree that says nine times out of ten I will outwrite you in an essay. Nine times out of ten, I will have the higher score. That’s why the question never was, “Can I do it?” I know I can. The question was, “Will I do it?” Because ability has nothing to do with inclination. Because we fall into the traps of safety and routine. Because I went to graduate school since that was what I was “supposed to do.”

Sitting in my car, back stuck with sweat to the seat fabric, I wondered how the hell I had gotten so duped. Tricked. Deceived. Played. The inner tension I felt had finally materialized: my dissatisfaction with graduate work in the form of me and unbearable heat, reparking my car in the shade of trees as the sun set. The form of me in a car, sweating out the seven hours I was supposed to be in class so my family didn’t begin to suspect I’d actually done it. That I’d actually failed. Quit. Dissatisfaction in the form of me and an imaginary handgun. Because the way I live, the things I value… you don’t quit. You never quit.

I was reminded of waterfalls. Maybe it was the heat, the way the sweat trickled down the back of my neck and slid into my shirt. Maybe it was the feeling that I’d finally lost it, that I was experiencing my very own quarter-life crisis complete with impulsive decisions and concentrated bursts of hysteria. I was reminded of waterfalls and the slow swell of Hawaiian ocean air, black sand beaches and miles of golden skin. I remembered pulling over on the side of the road to Hana and gaping in open-mouthed sixteen-year-old awe at the forty-five foot waterfall crashing with terrifying force into the most perfect pool of water I had ever seen. There was no hesitation. My sister and I ran like lunatics up the side of cliff, tearing away clumps of damp, dark earth in our haste to get to the top. We were going to jump. Of course we were. If that fat middle-aged tourist with the visor and mirrored sunglasses could jump, then of course we could. Of course, our legs and arms pumping with the kind of apeshit adrenaline specific to reckless youth.

We stood at the edge of the cliff and peered over. The feeling I got, seeing the water drop in freefall (nothing romanticized like cascade down or gracefully tumble—this was terrifying) was akin to the moment right before you have a car crash: guts clenching, mouth sucked dry of spit, and a heart-stopping sense of the inevitable. My sister and I looked at each other and shared a collective, “Oh, shit.” She, with a breathless shriek of joy, took a couple steps backward and then careened forward with haste that was either very brave or very stupid. She slipped on a patch of moss right at the edge and tripped off, falling parallel to the water below us. I watched with the kind of wide-eyed disbelief they show in movies, slow zoom close-ups in twenty-four frames per second as the killer is unmasked or the pregnancy test comes back positive. The sound her body made as it hit the water is a sound I will never forget.

She surfaced a couple seconds later, a sister-shaped blob of arms and water, and I remember thanking God that she didn’t die. I chewed my lip, hands balled into fists at my side as she treaded water below me.

“Does it hurt?” I called down, voice shaking.

“…Yeah.”

There was no laughter, none of that uncontainable excitement that had propelled her forward just a few seconds previous. There was only the short silence followed by an affirmative. Pause. Yes. Oh, shit.

The knowledge that it would hurt, that I would suffer legitimate injury from this, kept me pacing at the edge of the cliff for a full ten minutes. I didn’t have to do it. I could ignore the crazy waterfall jumping freaks behind me, rock-climbing gloves and smirks intact, and slide my way back down the side of the cliff. I’d walk away with a dirty ass and wounded pride, but my skin would be intact. After all, this little waterfall detour wasn’t even part of the plan, wasn’t on our family trip itinerary. I could just walk away, right? No. Ten minutes spent pacing, sweating it out, because you just don’t quit. You do the things you say you will, and you do them hard. You do them furiously, fiercely. I’m not a fucking quitter.

So I jumped.

I took a breath, grit my teeth, and kicked off from the very edge of the cliff. I fell like a crucifix, feet pointed straight and arms forced out by the flight of falling. I’d closed my eyes at the top, and after an eternity I tore them open only to find myself still plummeting a few feet above the water. Every inch of me slapped against the surface of that innocuous glittering pool. A hammer on concrete, a car into a brick wall, immovable objects against immoveable objects, and it fucking hurt. I was paralyzed in that perfect water, body throbbing like Life had backhanded me and I’d been struck dumb, all thought smashed out of my brain, bitchslapped back into infancy. I flailed my stinging arms feebly, wriggling my way to the surface. There was applause from watching tourists as I broke through, gasping and aching. Later, there would be bruises over 60% of my body.

So, sitting in my shitty Toyota in the middle of a sweltering winter, I wondered when I’d become a quitter. When I’d decided to cut and run when things got tough. It became less about Me versus Grad School and more about Me versus Life and how I let it beat me, how I let it win. Cue that imaginary handgun. It wasn’t enough that my planned out life, my salvaged from the wreckage of a fucked up childhood and set on the train tracks to a golden sunset, had been hopelessly derailed. There had to be the dawning realization that I’d done exactly what I’d never wanted to do: given in and given up.

I sat and chain-smoked, watching the minutes slip by, and visualized what was going on in class. I visualized how this professor would squint right before swearing, uttering a “fuck” in hushed impassioned tones. I imagined how another professor, a tiny woman fond of platform shoes, would toss up an endless stream of theorists and criticism as I marveled at how such a small body could hold such vast stores of supposedly valuable knowledge. I thought about enduring just one more day of higher education, and was overcome by disgust. I reasoned that sometimes you just have to know when to walk away. The waterfall? The story alone was worth it, worth the way it hurt to walk or even sit, worth the way it made me feel alive. But graduate school? Slaving away for three or more years over shit that only half-interests me so that I can fight tooth and nail over teaching positions? So you take a peek, measure the pros and cons, and figure out if it’s worth it. If it is, you jump. If it’s not? You walk away. There’s honor in that, having the foresight to look before you leap. There’s wisdom in knowing how to pick your battles, knowing when to shrug and turn your back. We can’t win them all, and some aren’t worth winning anyway, right?

Right?

Fuck that. I tried to reason with myself then, feeling sorry for myself in a car that felt like it was parked on the face of the sun. I tried to come to terms with walking away from something I’m good at, something I have the ability to do. But as each day passes, I come to realize that I didn’t walk away at all; I took a kamikaze leap. I threw myself over the edge with that same impetuousness my kid sister showed as she slipped and fell into Experience with a capital E. Grad school isn’t the waterfall; it’s the sorry beaten slide down off the side of the cliff. Grad school is according to plan, is playing it safe. As much as a twenty-five page paper on the construction of Wordsworth as a poet scares me, the thought of jumping out into the world without the parachute of a Ph.D. puts the fear of death and starvation into my blood, into my cells. “Oh, shit” is right. Those are the sentiments for my entire life, for every fallen expectation, for every fear of the unknown. Every single second as I freefall of the edge of a cliff.

But you know what? Fuck it. I spent seventeen years of my life playing it safe. Family trip itineraries, straight “A”s, full of potential, and for what? All of this to find, at the end of my life, that they can write this: She Played By The Rules. I refuse to let that happen. Give me the scars that have stories, thousands of dollars in student loan debts and uncertainty that makes every night sleepless. Give me the sucker punch that makes a life worth living, all the lust and terror that makes your heart beat loud in your ears. Give me waterfalls, lush and raging.

The end of the world sounds different than I thought it would. The end of a foreseeable future, of something safe and familiar that I constructed my entire reality around. I jumped off a waterfall as I drove home from the park that day, drenched from the sweat of winter and decision. And unlike the first time, eyes squeezed tight against the rush of the world, of life, I’m keeping my eyes open.