“Hi guys, so I took a plane ride today, and I never landed,” I said on my parents’ voicemail. I just had experienced my first dive into the abyss that rests between outer space and the ground.

When I reached Skydive Greene County in Xenia, Ohio, on Sunday, I was amazed at the energy. These people really know how to get high, I thought. Apparently the ticket to happiness is staying on the ground as little as possible. One jumper told me she’d been skydiving for years, but with kids to raise and mouths to feed, she doesn’t do it as much as she’d like. She’ll move to the drop zone when she can.

I always imagined skydiving as something you do when you get cancer: The last wahoo before you blow all your money in Vegas. But it also fit in perfectly for the approaching quarter-life crisis all 20.9-year-olds might experience.

It’s like a drug, they all told me. The videographer who later jumped out of the plane with me said skydiving would kill my crack addiction because it would start taking all my money. Thank God, I thought, because the crack is really getting to me.

After watching a training video and signing a mountain of papers, I was suited up and harnessed to my instructor. The imminent jump started to sink in as the plane left the ground; all of us lined up, straddling benches, gazing at the patchwork of southwestern Ohio below.

Strapped to me was my instructor, Robin, who had been skydiving 1,200 times. She would point out interesting things below, she joked to me, but this is Ohio.

Experienced jumpers, including my Athens escort Justine from the Ohio University Skydiving Club, were all straddling the benches with me, ready to jump out of a plane. It’s just another day for them, but you can tell it’s still a rush every time. I could barely breathe.

The door opened. In little groups, the hardcore skydivers in colorful suits scooted right up the bench and jumped out the plane into the ocean of sky like there was a baby pool below.

And then I jumped.

The first part of the dive is the best — free and uncontrollable. I screamed at the top of my lungs as I fell at 120 mph, all the time thinking: “When is the parachute, when is the parachute ...”

Being harnessed securely for the risks reminded me of a roller coaster ride, but it doesn’t feel like one at all. Skydiving is like taking a magic carpet on a pillow of sky. The danger of it looms, but going tandem with an instructor felt safe, and that’s the way I am. I’m the girl who likes being harnessed securely to do insane things, like making sure my friends have my legs tight before I do a keg stand.

Skydiving isn’t like flying or falling, but actually embracing a whole segment of earth we don’t usually get to experience. Maybe someday the sky will be nothing to us — we’ll be living in space ships and have kegs on the moon — but I won’t be around for that.