It would be wrong to let yourself fall. Wrong on so many levels I don’t have words to describe. But that doesn’t matter because you already know. I know you know.

So stand on that edge, experience that breeze, but always ensure your safe return. So you can write about it, in that way that only you can write.

Visit the raw places now and then - the cliff top, jagged shoreline, the roaring storm, alone. Let the rain bruise your skin, the rockpools cut your bare feet, the storm tear you apart - just once in a while, just long enough until you start to feel it hurting. Just until you remember why the pain is still there, and what it means.

There was a time earlier this year when I wanted to take a train to Land’s End. I want to stand on the cliff edge - right on the edge - with my arms spread out, feeling only the nudge of the sea breeze securing me to the world. I wanted to only let myself walk away when I realised precisely why it was wrong to let myself fall.

I never did it.

Thanks to your words, resonating about the inside of my mortal skull as I read them, I feel a little closer to no longer needing to.

AUW: Ha! There may or may not have been strangely coloured drool involved in my little adventure. That’s all I’m saying on that account. But beautiful? My, you certainly know how to flatter a girl.

Isabelle: Thank you. Thinking and rushing and feeling is what it’s all about.

Lillipilli: I think it’s good to lose all sense on occasion. Though a nasty fall could have proven otherwise.

So, these words made me think/rush/feel too.

I slept under the stars once, on the probably rather dangerous edge of a flat roof. But it was on top of a two-storey halls of residence at Middlesex Polytechnic in February 1990. I think I may have looked up at the stars too. Not that I remember, as I was only out there because somebody had spiked my drink. I woke up six o’clock the next morning, with gravel marks on the left side of my face, and oozing strangely coloured drool from the corner of my mouth. To this day, I don’t have a single recollection of what happened.

In other words, your experience is far more eloquent, magical and, needless to say, poetically phrased. Beautiful.