But more importantly, me.
In Rio I learned that I'm cripplingly afraid of heights.
I started to notice something off on Day One, when we climbed to the top of the Jesus.
(When I say 'climbed,' I of course mean 'took the tram thing'.)
I felt oddly nervous on the tram-thing, and then a little off on the Jesus himself. I remember thinking it was probably just residual nausea from the previous day's road trip, combined with the light sadness that comes when I'm about to be separated from Mark. (I know it's lame, but it's the truth.) Mark was returning to São Paulo the next day and Tickby and I would continue to Manaus.
So I felt woozy and unhappy. I avoided looking over the sides of the thousands-of-feet-high Jesus pedestal on which we stood.
But it was just a little, and the rest of the day was great. Spent laughing a lot, taking pictures of the Jesus, from the Jesus, and about the Jesus. We met young Mr. T on the Jesus (not kidding). At night we went to a plaza where there was live music, cold beer, and funny people.
Cut to the next day. Tickby and I went to the Pão de Acúcar - 'Sugarloaf,' - essentially two giant boob-like mountain peaks busting out of Rio. You take a gondola up to the first extremely-high-up nipple, and from there take another gondola up and across to the even-higher boob.
My hands began to tremble in the first gondola. I started to feel extremely sleepy, and had this weird sensation that the areas beneath my eyes were hollowing out. This, I thought, would cause my eyelids to slam shut and the rest of me to crumple like a bathrobe falling off a hanger.
I turned away from the window- which is funny because gondolas are kind of just a bunch of windows- and concentrated like Tiger Woods on staring at the mid-sections of people in the middle of the gondola. I think my idea was to look for familiar vistas. Just seeing midsections made this look more like the normal subway-like crowd it was, and would further the premise that there was a floor in the gondola which was intact and this wasn't dangerous. It kind of worked.
I felt a little better when we got out onto the first boob. The first boob was big and had a museum on it and a sculpture garden, and looked almost like a normal city block. So you could forget that you were unnaturally high up and could die from sneezing too hard.
Also me and Tickby had a photo-shoot of me doing inappropriate things with the sculptures, which helped.
And lastly, when Tickby did go to the edges to take photos of Rio-from-on-high, it wasn't horrifying because if you looked over the edge you saw that there were other tiers right below. In other words, if you did fall over the edge you'd just land like six feet lower and feel dumb. Not die of fast-fall heart failure.
But then Tickby wanted to go to the other boob.
Mind over matter! said I. To myself. We got into the gondola and i did the stare-at-strangers'-crotches meditation again.
But still was overcome with the same limb-weakening symptoms as before. I also started feeling nauseous, and most interestingly: hysterical. I kept it all hidden inside because i'm a ninja, but I felt like my heart was breaking while a swarm of killer-Al-Qaeda bees were hating me in the face. I felt my pulse banging faster and louder until I was pretty sure I was going to die.
Predictably, I didn't die. Which was good. So I got off at the second boob. Which has no other tiers. And is just a slab of floor roosting atop a million-foot-high blade of grass.
The only thing there that separates you from becoming a blood-pancake is an old, rusty, wide open railing. Tickby ran off the gondola and right over to the edge to start snapping photos. I followed her on the WEIRDEST, most alien, rickety legs that used to be mine.
And here is probably the climax of this journey through irrational-fear-hell. As i wobbled toward Tickby --who had her back to me-- and tried to process the sight of my sister standing inches away from a million-mile drop, she LEANED FORWARD, over the railing, to take a picture. And I almost passed out.
It felt like the midsection of my body had been annihilated and my shoulders would now crash down to my hips. My hands were shaking so impossibly hard they looked like they were in disco lights.
I admitted to Tickby now that I was now learning I didn't like heights. We both laughed for a minute, at the weirdness of it all, and then I went to find a place to sit down. I came across a wonderful little pocket or non-death - an area between two buildings, with a bench! - and sat down to wait.
And CRIED for like five minutes.
Even as it happened, I was weirdly fascinated by all of this. I knew that there was nothing to cry about. I knew in my head that I wasn't sad, that it was a great day. I was in a beautiful place. I knew I wasn't in danger, that people ride these gondolas and visit these boob-mountains all day every day and none of them die from fear-fainting over the sides. I knew all of this, and yet could not stop the woozies, or the super-sads, and this was very interesting. I thought that as soon as I got home I would find and scour tons of reading material on irrational fears and learn all about whatever psychiatrists have discovered and concluded about them.
I of course didn't do this, because, you know, BORING, but I sure thought I would that day on the boob.
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