October 30, 2002 | 9:54 AM

One summer day when I was seven years old, my mother took my cousin Melissa and I to the playground. Straight away the two of us headed right for the swings. I had only recently learned to pump the swings on my own without needing a grown-up to push me, and doing so was still a novelty.

I swung my legs back and forth, back and forth, gaining momentum as I heaved my body from side to side. Up up up I climbed higher and higher into the sky with each to and fro. It was thrilling. I was entranced by my own weightlessness. I was getting so high that I felt I almost might swing around the very top as though somersaulting and loop over the other side. Forgetting for a moment the laws of gravity, in an almost religious ecstasy I raised both of my hands in the air on the down swoop.

And fell backwards off the swing.

Betrayed by cold hard science I hit the ground face up with a splat. Above me the blue July sky shimmered and seemed to split apart into millions of pixilated dots. The impact of the fall reverberated through my chest, and my diaphragm went into spasms (a problem which has reoccurred on occasion ever since this incident). I tried to take a breath but couldn�t get any air into my lungs. Something in my body had shifted, and impulses I had always taken for granted were suddenly beyond my reach.

It was a special pain, not like slicing your knee open or having a sliver taken out of your finger. Or even like the sore throat I�d had prior to getting my tonsils out. This was a pain I had no rational idea of how to cope with. Suddenly, it seemed I wasn�t even in the same body anymore. There was no context in which to re-discover how to breathe.

I�ve always liked films the enjoyment of which is primarily derived from a sudden exchange of contexts during the last five minutes. You know�like Memento, or The Sixth Sense or Chinatown.

The Sixth Sense and Memento and Chinatown don�t operate as traditional mystery stories a la Sherlock Holmes where the protagonist embarks on a linear journey towards the unveiling of the truth�the truth usually being something outside himself (i.e. Who killed Mrs. Plum in the dining room with the nightstick?), and being dependent on his ability to put the pieces of a puzzle together and hunt down clues. Memento and The Sixth Sense and Chinatown are so effective because both the audience and the character operate under a false belief system for 9/10ths of the movie. Both the protagonist and the audience have some subconscious inkling of this�that something just isn�t quite right, but can�t put their fingers on exactly what it is. Until the last five minutes when the pay off comes and everyone realizes that the real mystery was not environmental or plot driven, but wholly personal and had to do with nothing more than the harrowing politics of the protagonist�s soul. In those last five minutes, one context is exchanged for another and all is illuminated.

Over the past five days I�ve been feeling a lot like Jake in Chinatown and Bruce Willis at the end The Sixth Sense, and a tad like Leonard Shelby in Memento (though unlike him, I will not slip into false memory again)

And I�ve been feeling very very much like the little girl I was at age seven when I head over heeled it backwards off the swing and my vital functions momentarily ceased working.

Five days ago I realized suddenly, that the entire context under which I have been operating for my entire adult life was completely and totally false. My assumptions were negated. The futility of my past actions became crystal clear. It had all been hinted at before, but never had it been spelled out to me so plainly.

And I find myself at the end of a psychological mystery story, confronting the harrowing politics of my own god damned soul. Hardly remembering how to fucking breathe. And let me tell you it is no god damned fun at all.

And so other than the debaucherous and magical night of karaoke with Josh and Debbie, I have been hiding in my apartment, trying to work through it all, immersing myself in the new language I am learning, and peeling off the skin of my past�a past which is not at all what I thought it was.

It seems like an awfully strange time to begin dating someone new. Five days after your world has been blown apart and your heart torn to pieces.

I keep telling myself,

It�s just one date and I can leave anytime I like. I have control. I don�t need to jump down a rabbit hole again and spend another six years at a mad tea party.

But I�m afraid. I�m so afraid. Just one silly date and I�m terrified.

But I�m doing it anyway. I�m fucking doing it anyway.