In hind sight I should have brought a videocamera. Video courtesy of robertdavoudi.

Three times in my life I’ve thought I was going to die. Each time my heart and my body reacted the same way. My brain handled it different each time.

a) I was in India and tried to master the sea. It ended up with me being caught forty meters out with the current pulling me down and dragging me along the sea floor so hard that I started to bleed from my chest and stomach. The Indian lifeguards stood on the beach along with Russian tourists, their blond wives and a shocked Povel; who wondered what the fuck I was doing, whilst he felt a quiet relief about having had those ear infections as a child.

My first reaction was pure anger; I will not fucking die! It took twenty minutes to fight my way inland. When I felt the sand beneath my knees my whole body was shaking. The next four days dreamt about tsunamis and had an itchy, salty taste in my mouth.

b) I was on my way home from Marseilles with E, who is terribly afraid of flying. Suddenly the plane began to dive. Since E was sitting like a frightened kitten and was very pale in the face I couldn’t let myself be affected by my own fear. I acted cool and said things like:

- It's natural.

- It’s supposed to sound like that.

- No, it's just that the engine lags bit

If there’s anything I do well it’s putting on a serious face when I don’t have a clue what  I'm talking about. But it is a bit harder putting on a serious face when your stomach is packing a bag to go seek asylum in another body.

c) I skydived. I went out to Vårgårda with four equally scared guys, went up in a rickety plane to four thousand meters high and with my tandem pilot on my back, I crawled out of the door and jumped. Forty-five seconds of free fall. You have no idea. Have you jumped from five meters at some point? Into the water? You know that millisecond of freedom? Right. Like that. But for forty-five seconds. Pure horror. The body shuts down. The brain shuts down and you can only think of monosyllabic words. Cold. Large. Fast.

When we landed, I was rushing hard. I was completely empty and drunk on my rush. It took two hours. Then came the happiness. The insanely deep and strong energy. As soon as it hit me I screamed. I had jumped out of a plane, I had voluntarily sent my body through the air at 200 kilometers per hour and I had survived. My choice. My jump. My life.