A teenager leaps off a 35-storey skyscraper to her death, a suicide note in her pocket saying she couldn’t take any more, having argued with her boyfriend. An inflatable cushion, the size of a coin seen from her vantage point, catches her fall. She bounces. She’s left with grazed hands and legs and remains conscious, with nothing tangible broken.

There’s a supermarket car park near Richmond in Surrey that lies directly under the flight path of planes landing at Heathrow – it happens to be under the spot where undercarriages are opened in preparation for landing. Every now and again, a mangled frozen dark-skinned corpse is found there on the tarmac. Identification is often difficult, as the stowaway often has no papers; by a process of deduction, the flight can usually be identified, and the police force in the Asian country over which he died many hours previously, from exposure and/or asphyxiation, will be notified, with no response expected.

A myoclonic jerk is the sudden spasm that occurs in the liminal stage when we are falling asleep; the brain reacts to the perception that heart rate is falling and sends out a convulsive signal to reactivate the body. It is often interpreted in dreams as if we have been falling from a height, or stumbling and about to hit the ground, the jerk is the moment we wake, apparently to save us from impact.

On my wall, a remnant from my days training as a counsellor, is a piece of doggerel that is shamelessly New Age in style, but its truth still resonates with me. It’s about falling into holes in the street, a metaphor for self-destructive patterns and relationships, and the slow journey we have to take to eventually stop falling into them. First there is awareness that we are falling into the hole in the street; often that first stage is very difficult; we feel victims of other people and situations repeatedly, and believe it isn’t our fault, and feel lost and alone. The fact that we invite these people and situations into our lives is a hard concept to grasp.

After the dawning of awareness, we still find ourselves falling into the hole in the street. It’s as if knowledge alone doesn’t change things; but it seems necessary that we keep to our self-destructive habits for a while, consciously, if only to build up a sense of horror and disbelief that we are capable of giving ourselves such a hard time.

We try different ways of thinking about the hole in the street. We pretend it isn’t there, which is hardly a successful technique; we pretend being in a hole isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, as we lick our wounds at the bottom of a cold and rocky pit. We take our time to learn that we don’t belong down there. Next time, we find ourselves walking down the street, and see the hole coming, we know it’s terrible, we know we shouldn’t, and our bodies still carry us forward out of habit, tripping headlong into darkness. It’s a depressing time.

Eventually, we find the resources within us to avoid walking into the hole; a combination of awareness, courage, and a belief that we don’t deserve to spend our lives in the dark. It’s a great feeling. Sometimes we miss the familiar space, and we may occasionally pay a return visit or two just to remind ourselves of what life used to be like.

Finally, so the poem goes, we walk down a different street, one with no holes. That’s when we’ve managed to change our lives.

Anonymous sex is my particular hole in the street, if you’ll pardon the pun. Sex with a stranger is like jumping off a cliff with someone; it’s exciting, it’s dangerous, it’s an adrenaline rush second-to-none, and it gives you great views as you’re hurtling hand in hand down to the rocks below. There is a lot of trust between the two strangers, of an existential sort, a sort of hari-kiri camaraderie; lemming-like, we queer brothers will leap off any cliff with each other for kicks. Holding our breaths, we dive into the foaming ocean below, exhilarating and shockingly cold, waking you up to the elemental risks of living dangerously.

But the end result is the same; we still end up flattened, bedraggled and wet on the shore below. We pretend we’re not bruised, we learn not to feel any pangs as we dry off and prepare to climb up to the top of the cliff, to find another man to jump off with, whose face you will study in amazement as the wind buffets his face on the way down through the spray.

Staying on the ground and getting to know the person you’ve just shared a death-defying trip with is unappealing, boring, compared to the fairground ride of cliff-jumping with strangers. To make the dive more appealing, we learn tricks and aim for higher cliffs; loop-the-loop into oblivion, again and again and again.

I want to stop this heady intense way of getting to know men. True, there’s a deep knowledge learned in the snippets of detail you manage to convey to each other, by words and expressions, on the way down; but mostly you’re marvelling at the face of a man in extremis, ecstatic, thrill-seeking; there may be a kind man there, even a kindred spirit; but he’s out for kicks, not anything more, and so, despite all protestations to the contrary, are you.

It’s time I left the cliffs and the rocks below, and went inland, exploring the heartland. Taking a longer, deeper journey into the woods, listening to a slower rhythm of life, leaving the pounding testosterone surf behind. I may get lost in the valleys and the hills, I may see things I’ve never encountered before. It’s not without risk or adventure, but it’s a different kind; a gentler trek upriver through tributaries and streams, by willows and oaks, towards the source of things.