When I was in high school, I found a video online of this kid doing a trick I couldn't do - it was a frontside heelflip - and I watched it over and over again, between sessions. I couldn't get it, couldn't get it. Started watching, real close.

One day, I watched it and I noticed something new. It looked like the video slowed down a little while the board was in the air. No big deal, people edit their videos. I tried speeding my movements up, but I just wasn't getting it. It wasn't even close.

The week went by, then I went and watched the video again. I saw the slowdown, but then as I looked, I realized that there was a dude in the background and he didn't slow down at all. He cruised through the whole shot. I put up pieces of tape on the screen and measured it out. I got my mom to help me with the math. It didn't line up. The guy was spending too long in the air, and the other guy was in the shot. He was right behind him. Mom told me it was edited.

I looked at the comments, and nobody had spotted it. The kid was still making videos, he'd posted this one years ago, but his editing was dogshit. Windows Movie Maker-ass videos. Bandicam watermarks. That kind of shit.

I went through it frame by frame, and week by week, I replicated everything. First off, I got the trick. Later, it clicked, and I kept landing them. I must have looked pretty stupid, frontside heelflip, frontside heelflip, frontside heelflip, frontside heelflip. I bought his shirt, his shoes, his hat, everything. I already had the same board as him.

One day I looked, and I noticed that he had taken a sharpie to the board. There was a cool S on it. You know the cool S, right? Stussy? The Stussy S? No!?? I'll draw it for you.

Three vertical lines on top, three on the bottom. You connect the middle one to the outer ones, upper middle to lower... right, lower middle to upper left, join up the outer lines on the top and the bottom, and fill in the last lines that go behind the middle of the S. Only this guy fucked up, and he did it backwards. He obviously couldn't fix it, it was sharpie.

After I drew it on the board, shit started happening. I felt it. I also immediately ate shit, the timing was all fucked up. I went and found a new, private spot to practice. I wasn't going higher, I was just staying there. I stole a timer from one of my friends and started checking how much time I was spending in the air. Pretty quickly, I was up to a second and a half. In a couple weeks, I was at four seconds. I recorded a few videos on my phone.

I tried doing it with other tricks, and it took a while, but I started getting it. Eventually, I could just ollie and hang. I hit ten seconds, then thirty, then a minute. It was all about the balance. During spring break, I didn't do anything else. I told my parents I was with my friends, and told my friends I had to go to camp. By the end of the break, I could stay up as long as I wanted.

Things ended up falling apart for my parents, and it ended up being harder and harder to keep at it. It was weird, though. I was only doing it for me, but I couldn't really get any better. I didn't wanna Google levitation too much in case the government came after me. I found that old video again. Nobody noticed how he hung in the air.

I got into a decent college, and now I'm studying engineering. It sucks, but I'm doing okay.