The wind was blowing strongly against her back. Her hair flew everywhere and the sleeves of her jacket too. She walked back and forth over the cement like a balance bean, one foot in front of the other. When she got to the middle she would always stop and put her arms out like she was flying and look at the sky. It was a dark blue black today full of clouds about to burst open with tears just like her. She would bite her lips and keep walking back and forth. Sometimes the wind almost blew her over but she just kept walking. For a few minutes, she would stop and sit down with her feet hanging off and she would light a cigarette and let it kill her insides one inhale at a time. But I'm sure that was the least of her worries. She would walk back and forth for hours every single day for months. Maybe something happened before and made her want to go up there and risk her life every single day. Or maybe her insides just stopped working properly. But for some reason this week things were a little different. When she walked, it was slower but less careful. Careless, you could say. And when she stopped in the middle, I swear she was almost going to fall forward. And when she smoked her cigarette, she would down a bottle of vodka as well. Making her walking on the balance bean of cement wobbly. Somedays she would lay down sobbing. But I could tell she was trying to not cry, which made it even more painful to watch. I thought maybe I should put flowers up there one day. Maybe that would at least make her smile. It might not stitch together her insides or her broken heart. But maybe just maybe it would get her to smile for a moment out of the day. Probably something she never did. I decided to get flowers today. Today was September 28. It was the day I realized that sometimes people fall down and never get back up again. 
    I went to school and went through my boring everyday life. But after school, I stopped at the store and bought a bunch of flowers, roses, sunflowers, and daisies. I didn't know what she would like so I got all three. And I started my way to the top of the building next to mine that she walked across everyday. I took the elevator all the way up. I had to walk up a flight of stairs to the roof. When I opened the door, I saw her already there. She was walking to the middle. My heart started racing when she stopped and put her hands out, like she was flying. She started to lean forward, and I screamed running towards her. She turned around and looked me in the eyes just as she started to fall. I ran as fast I could throwing the flowers onto the ground. When I made it to the edge, she was flying, with her arms out. Just like she always had wanted, but she wasn't going up. She was going down. I stared into her eyes the whole way down screaming tears running down my face. I closed my eyes for a second to whip the tears away and she had hit the ground. The sound echoed in my ears. But it wasn't what I expected it to be like. I looked down she landed in the giant trash cans. Could she still be alive? I thought. I ran to pick up the flowers and sprinted down all the stairs. No need to wait for the elevator. When I made it to the bottom floor, I ran out the door and around to the side. She laid unmoving in the trash can. I put my hand on her neck to see if she had a pulse. I think I felt something but I didn't know for sure. I picked her up and carried her with the flowers on her. I yelled for a taxi but none stopped. I pulled out my phone to ring 911 but it was dead. So I ran 10 blocks to the hospital.
          "Someone please help" I screamed as I ran through the automatic doors. "She.. She jumped off a building. But she landed in trash bins."
    I was talking so fast I didn't even know if anyone could understand me. Doctors rushed me a ernie to put her on. I told them I couldn't leave her. They asked her name and if I was related, I said I didn't know who she was. They said I would have to wait out here. I sat down in one of the plastic chairs. But I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. I was shaking. My head was spinning. Why didn't I get her flowers earlier? I had been watching this beautiful girl for months and I didn't do anything. I stood up and started pacing back and forth. I couldn't breathe my lungs were screaming at me. Everything started to go dark. Then blackness.
         I opened my eyes to the blinding brightness of the ceiling lights. I was laying in a hospital bed myself. I couldn't remember what exactly happened for a moment. Then everything came rushing back. I tried to jump up but my arm pulled me back, and pain shot through me. I had a IV in my forearm. I pulled it out and ran out into the hallway. A nurse came rushing over. "Sir, sir please get back into bed."
    "Where is she?" I yelled resisting her trying to usher me back to the bed.
    "Sir you fell very hard you need rest."
    "Where the hell is she?" I screamed "I need to see her now!"
     She stopped trying to push me back.
     "Fine. But she is in a coma and has very serious brain damage. We aren't sure she will wake up."
     The nurse walked me to a room down the hall. I walked in. The flowers were in a vase next to her bed. A breathing tube was stuck down her throat. Her face was pale. I had never seen her this up close before, besides carrying her here. But from my window she always had lots of dark makeup on. And now her face was clear. She was so beautiful, her skin was flawless. She had freckles under her eyes and on top of her nose. I wanted to brush her hair out of her face but I was scared to touch her, as if she was a glass doll ready to break. But I guess she was. We are all really. We get pushed to the point in which we are so fragile anything could break us. And she broke. And now here she lay possibly never going to wake up again, with a complete stranger by her bedside. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it. Completely avoiding all the fear that had just rushed through me. I laid back in a chair next to her head and held her hand as my eyes closed.
    I spent the next few days there. I didn't care about school or work or anything. I just sat by her bedside every second. The nurses said they still haven't found who she is or a family that she belonged to. It hurt me to think that no one out there was looking for her. I thought maybe she had a bag on the roof. I kissed her hand before I ran out of the hospital. When I ran out the doors, I just decided to run all the way there. And up all those stairs. By the time I got to the top I could hardly breathe, but nothing like the moment I saw her falling. There was a bag to the side of the roof by the doorway. It was black and had a few pins on it; Green Day, Pierce the Veil and Bring Me the Horizon. Good bands, I thought. I opened the big pocket first. There was a half empty bottle of vodka a few notebooks and some pens. Then I opened the front pocket there was a wallet and a pack of cigarettes. I open the wallet, and there was a twenty dollar bill and a ID. Her face was on it. Her expressionless face staring right at me. The name read Effy Gray. She had green eyes, black hair, she's 5'5, weighs 120 pounds and is 16 years old. My hands started shaking as I stared at her picture, ingraining it in my brain. I don't know why finding this made me so upset. Maybe it was that she was real, all of this was real. I had been pretending my whole life, existing in the shadows. I pretended for so long I never wanted to be myself again. I actually had that written on my wall, it was a quote to remind myself every morning to just be me.
     It read "Pretending is fun until the pretending comes to ending and you don't want to be yourself anymore."
     Nothing ever felt real but now a beautiful, oh so, beautiful girl is a on the verge of dying, and I could of stopped her if only I walked a little faster or came a day sooner. I put everything back in her bag and ran all the way back to the hospital with her bag bouncing against my back. I talked to the nurse and gave her the ID, she said she would search for her family. I looked at her laying in the bed.
     "Effy", I thought.
     I kissed her hand and decided to go home for a few hours.

    When I reached the doorstep to my apartment, I was biting my lip so hard, to keep from crying, I swear it was going to bleed. I went to my room and turned the volume on my stereo all the way up and grabbed my notebook and a bottle of gin. I sat at my desk and started to write.
    I can't stop thinking about how how much Effy looked like her. She had the same freckles and the same little nose and even the creases around her cheek bones were the same. But she wasn't her, she is a whole different person. I know nothing, absolutely nothing about her. Besides that she drinks and smoked her pain away until she can't take whatever was going through her head anymore. But mom did the same thing..

    I stopped writing when I saw lighting strike through the sky, followed by a pounding of thunder. I closed my notebook and changed my clothes. They smelled horrid. I hadn't changed since everything happened. I put on a red plaid jacket and blue jeans. I decided I would take a taxi back to the hospital since it had started raining.
    When I got to Effy's room, there were a few people all around it yelling. I ran over and asked the nurse, who had been tending to Effy, what was going on.
      "This is Effy's family." she said.
       I pushed pasted a tall man with a beard, I assumed her father and a large women with black curly hair, probably mom. I sat down next to her hospital bed and held her hand.
      "Who the hell are you?" asked the tall bearded man.
       I sat there for a moment thinking. Who was I?
      "Uh, I found her. a friend I guess. names Kyle," I stood up and put my hand out. He took it and shook.
     And then I sat back down. Her mother started crying and sat on the other side of the bed. Her father stood at the edge.
     "Kyle brought her in, and didn't leave her bedside for days," the nurse said as she changed Effy's IV.
      "We appreciate that." her father said leaning up against the wall. "Effy has disappeared for days on end so we didn't think anything of it, until the hospital called."
      I wanted to yell at them for just letting her go on her own and not thinking anything of it. What kind of parents are you? I wanted to scream.
      But I grabbed the sides of my chair and kept my mouth shut.
The next few weeks were hard. I stayed with Effy at almost all the times until her parents insisted I go home and shower. But even then I went as fast as I could. I was scared she was never going to wake up. I wanted her to. For selfish reasons, like I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to know what she thought, what she believed, what she liked and didn't like. I didn't know one thing about this girl besides her favorite brand of cigarettes and that she had green eyes. And I wanted her to get to know me. I wanted to tell her all my secrets. But I also wanted to wake up because she deserves to live. Her parents don't deserve to burry their own daughter.
    Todays was November 2. It was possibly the worst day of my life. I woke up in the chair by Effy's bedside to the loud beeping of the machines that she was connected to. I was holding her hand and realized she was squeezing mine. The motors were going crazy I had no idea what was happening. Nurses and doctors came running in yelling words and numbers I didn't understand. I just stood there holding her hand with tears streaming down my face. The beeping machine went blank. Instead of constant beeping, there was one solid sound echoing in my head. The doctors pushed me out the door and started to yell numbers and the word "clear". I laid my head against the window looking in her room, I was screaming now. I didn't even realize it until Effy's parents came running over to me. They looked at me and I saw their mouths moving but I couldn't hear anything but the solid sound of her pulse stopped. The doctors stopped yelling numbers and stopped putting needles in her and slowly left her room. I was now laying on the floor with my head on my knees. I couldn't breathe. I felt as if I had just fallen off a bridge into freezing water. I felt someone put their hand on my back. I looked up to see Effy's father pulling me up. He walked me over to the chair I had sat in for the past 36 days. I took her hand in mine; it was cold. Her mother took her other hand, and her father grabbed her mothers shoulders. We all sat there in silence for what seemed like hours. They stood up and went to talk in the hallway. When they came back in, they told me the service would be next week. I nodded and looked back down at Effy's beautiful face. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead and then ran all the way home in the pouring rain.
    When I got home I stripped off my wet clothes and put on a pair of shorts. I looked by my desk. Her bag was under it. I had forgot about it. I sat down and opened it. I pulled out the vodka and the cigarettes and her notebooks. I took a few sips of the vodka and then opened her notebook. The first page was titled

                        Him
    Today was the first day I saw him. He was watching me out his window. He had dark brown hair that just cover his eyes. I couldn't see his eyes, but I bet they were brown too. He watched my every move, I swear. I wonder why he found me so interesting to watch.  Maybe he just had nothing better to do. That's usually what I'm used for. But he didn't seem to watch me with amusement, it was more like he was curious or concerned. But I've been walking along this building for months. Has he been watching me all along? Why wouldn't he do something? Couldn't he tell why I was here? But why would he care, why would anyone care about me? I'm nothing; I'm invisible. He probably wasn't even watching me. He was probably looking right through me like everyone else. I just don't understand why I feel like this everyday. I can't seem to stop the voices in my head. They have convinced me to do things I never wanted to do. And even after all the times I've tried to cut them out, they stay, screaming at me all at once. I just don't see the point in being here anymore, like whats the point to keep going if I feel like I've been dead for so long. I'm sick of being eaten alive.

    I couldn't read anymore. My cheeks were burning with tears. I stood up and started pacing back and forth. My breaths started getting shorter. My sobs started getting louder. I couldn't take it anymore. I swung my fist into the wall. My knuckles started to bleed but I didn't feel them. I punch another spot and another and another. My arms were covered in blood but I couldn't feel a thing. I picked up the bottle of vodka and chugged it all. It stung as it went down but I didn't care. I ran out my door, down the hall to the stairs. I opened the roof door, and the rain started pouring down on my bare chest smearing blood all over me. I walked over to the edge of the building right across from where Effy walked everyday. I started to walk across the balance bean of cement just like she had done for months. I stopped in the middle and put my arms out to fly. then I turned and kept walking back and forth back and forth. One foot then the other. It was easy at first to keep my balance, and then things started to get blurry and my hands kept shaking. I stopped in the middle and closed my eyes. I raised my arms up as high as I could. I thought about how when I was a little kid I always had wanted to fly. Just spread my arms like wings and go off with the wind. So I decided I would. I put my arms out to the sides and leaned forward until I felt the air push against my face. I swear for a moment I was truly flying I opened my eyes, and I was as high as the birds in the sky. And then I felt pain shoot through my body. I saw a bird flap it's wings and fly across the sky. Then everything went black.