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The Dead Fall Down
The breeze was calming. It chills down your spine and almost makes you smile. Calm, collective, your mind is at ease. The building below you seems to sway a bit in the cool, spring wind. Here on the ledge, there is nothing above you, but also nothing below you. Cars race past on the street under the faint clouds. Feet trembling, knuckles clenching, you know this is what you want, what you need to do to be happy, peaceful as a butterfly flying in an open field. You think to yourself, this is the end, this is where all the madness stops, no more yelling, screaming, arguing, just peace, sweet, lonely peace. Through your life you never amounted to more than something someone could use their poetic tongue to control. This really is your sweet release, your guilty pleasure. Another breeze comes by, almost knocking you back from the ledge, chilling you straight to the bone, sending your stomach into hell. There isn’t a second chance in this, you do this now and there’s no going back. Slowly but surely, one foot goes over, the other follows, then your body, tumbling gracefully through the air as if you had trained for it all your life. It would be a long fall, past 110 levels of windows, you soon to be ex-coworkers wondering what that noise and blur was that just went past their window. After a short time, you seem to fall at a constant speed, no longer going faster, just coasting down the side of the building. It is relaxing now, with maybe six hundred feet left till the ground. The breeze feels nice, but still seems to be trying to push you back to the other side of the ledge. People on the ground are gathering around, noticing the chaos that is unfolding in front of them, the peaceful end that is your fall. Not much longer now, you can start to make out individual faces, freckled, tanned, pale, some with glasses, some with hats, cops pushing them away while they try to figure out how to save you, but there is no way to save you, hurtling down to the earth at an unstoppable speed, soaring past the birds and the windows, not caring about hard you will hit the ground. Maybe 250 feet left, your life begins to flash before your eyes, seemingly nice and bittersweet at first, but horrid by the time it ends. You remember all the loves you had taken up, all the friends, the memories of long ago and of recent events popping up like blisters, sore and unwanted, but they won’t leave. You have made a grave mistake. What you thought was the wind pushing you to safety was really your conscious telling you that you are wrong for this, that everything is better than it seems, that your end hasn’t come yet. This horrid realization makes you scream, except, you can’t scream, strong winds pushing your voice right back in, not allowing any noise to come out. You are terrified, worried, crying, but above all, regretful. You have chosen this end, the ground is now getting closer and closer with every passing second, hard and concrete, never moving, you tumble toward it like an Olympic diver. Here it comes, the end. There is a sudden crack, something splintered, and everything goes black in an instant. There is a body on the ground, surrounded by strange faces, a pool of blood beginning to come out from under it. The person jumped, no one can figure out why they did it, why they ended their life so quickly. An entire life’s story has ended in less than a second. There was no fading of the light, as if it were the sun setting on a long and beautiful day, just to reveal the dark and foreboding night, but rather like a light switch being turned off, the world suddenly being put into complete darkness. There is no explanation, there is only blood.