I went up the tree because that is what you do. Nobody explains it to you. You are small and then you are up the tree, and the branch is the branch, and you wait. That is the job. The museum says I do not exist. There is a page. I have read the page. It has a photograph of a koala with the ears drawn bigger and it says hoax at the bottom, and I have been up a tree for most of my life, so one of us is wrong and it is not the tree.

Up there it is dark most of the time. You sleep. Twenty hours is normal, the museum has that part right, though it says it about the other animal. You wake, and the dark is the same dark, and something is walking underneath, and the whole of your body knows what comes next before you do. That is what a drop is. It is not a decision. I want to be clear about that because of what I did later.

I remember the last one. I do not talk about it at the gym. I will say that I was in the air for longer than it looks from the ground, and that when I landed I understood something, and that I have not dropped since. People call that enlightenment. I call it the last one. I became a vegan the same week. Nobody drops on a vegetable.

Then I left. I went a long way, to the places where it is darker than a tree. Caves. The deep parts — the recesses, the fissures, the depressions where the rock goes in on itself and you have to lie flat to get through. I painted on the walls. I painted animals, the way it has always been done down there, for tens of thousands of years, by whoever it was. Look at the caves. There are horses, bison, hands. There are almost no people. That is not an accident and it is not a gap. It is the deepest cut of them all, and I made it too, on purpose, on every wall I touched. Why is it a secret. Wise eat a see crit. Ask me again and I will say it slower.

I came back. I started a fund. It folded. If you are owed money you are directed to Eleffant Investments, which took the chair, and the notice ran in this paper, and I have nothing to add to the notice except that my VBA skills were and are ten out of ten and the market has never once priced that.

I went to Takin Orders and asked to be CFO. Nobody said no. Nobody said anything. I bought the tie. I bought the sweaters. I built the deck, I changed into the track suit at eleven, I announced the pipeline. Whether anyone liked it or not was the point of the pipeline. The title is still in negotiation. That is not a joke. That is the status.

Now I teach at the gym. When I walk across the floor people lower their eyes. In a good way. I know the difference. The other kind of lowered eyes I saw from a branch, for years, and this is not that. Junior comes some mornings and punches the heavy bag and I let him. He is not there yet.

Some nights I go up. Not to drop. I am clear on that, and the tree is clear on that, and the museum can put whatever it likes at the bottom of its page. I stand on the branch in the dark, the same dark as before, and something walks underneath, and my body knows what comes next, and nothing comes next. That is the whole of what I have learned and it is obvious and it is all there.

I have my favorite film. I have three Slim Jims and a PowerBar from the nineties in the glove box of the Prius. I have a standing invitation to drive up north, alone, whenever the room turns.

I am standing here in the dark. It is the same dark. I am not the same.