My brother-in-law Samu told me as we watched our daughters hop away.
I never know what people mean when they say “real” world. It is as if somehow one reality is more important than another as if I have my daughter in a video game, and at some point, I will unplug her from the game and introduce her to the real world.

Every single person has one reality, which puts them at least at seven billion, but then every family, church, society, state, country, arcade, bowling alley, and bar has one, too.

In reality, there are trillions of reality.

In Samu’s case, this meant that “ she will be fully bilingual, dance reggaeton, and want to zip line and skydive.”

Aside from being bilingual, which I am already working on at my own ‘malparido tiempo,’ everything else is a hard pass for me.

I don’t see the appeal in my girls twerking to Bad Bunny, and I especially do not see the appeal in skydiving.

Which Samu apparently has not done but wants to do in the near future.

To me, guys who skydive with another man strapped behind their backs secretly just want to be humped at 120 mph from 14,000 feet with very little oxygen. I guess it’s not that much different than autoerotic asphyxiation.

Honestly, if you want a man to rub against your bum, there are safer ways to do it. I have friends who would do it for free, and Samu wouldn’t even have to risk life and limb. He would just have to be honest with my sister and come out of the closet.

Maybe I get it.

For one second, you can forget that the world is hard, and you strap yourself to a hunk of a man with a frame big enough to carry his worries and your worries, a man you can count on when the going gets tough, who will call when he says he will call and who will sleep on the wet side of the bed.

There is probably nothing like the feeling of being carried by a burly man in a baby sling with his eclair strapped against your buns.

Because for a moment, you can forget it all in the thrill of free-falling away from life’s worries.

But if you are unlucky and don’t make it, I can’t imagine a worse way to go.
I have heard that when people jump out of skyrises, the fear is so biologically overwhelming that sometimes it induces a heart attack before jumpers make it to the pavement.

So it looks gruesome, and it could be quite shocking if you find yourself going for a mid-afternoon coffee stroll and such a person lands next to you.

But the passing sounds somewhat peaceful.

It’s no different than someone having a coronary after living on a diet of deep-fried Twinkies, salami pizza drenched in ranch, and dousing “I can’t believe it’s not butter” on hot biscuits.

But when your parachute doesn’t work, and you realize there is not enough time to will yourself into a heart attack, your next thought will be, “Oh, this is how I go. This was always a possibility. Why am I surprised? Now, my family will find me pancaked unto this man.”

Why do it if you don’t secretly want to have a man smash against you once your parachute doesn’t open?

And that’s how you will be found: two men lying next to each other in what might look like a gruesome Romeo-and-Juliet-style final scene.

“In fair splatter ground, where we lay our scene,
From a helicopter jump to new mutiny,
Where civil bone(r)s make civil buns unclean.
From forth the fatal loin of this tandem coach
A pair of star-crossed lovers land on their lives;
Whose misadventured jump overthrows
With their idea to give free falling another go.”

Maybe Samu should leave my niece with me for one week, and when he comes to get her, she will be ready for the real world—or at least my reality, one where she doesn’t want to skydive but makes fun of men who want to go skydiving as a proxy for their most inner desires.