Falling

         “I’ll be home soon.” He whispered to the wind, which, seventy stories up was blowing rather furiously. The words, spoken with an air of poignant doubt about them, were lost to the world as they drifted away. He held a very brief moment of introspective silence, during which he finalized and rationalized his decision. He took a step forward with his eyes closed, teetering on the edge, a place frequented only by daredevils and the damned. And then he leaned. He fell forward, past the ledge, and felt the stoic and absolute embrace of gravity grip him and pull him downward. It was a pleasant feeling, the initial rush of excitement, despite its relative brevity.

         To him, as he bounded around inside his own mind, the entire ordeal felt as though it would last a lifetime. His lifetime, to be more precise. Memories, all of them sour and bitter and laced with regret, flew before his eyes like the frames of an old motion picture. He watched his daughter grow up and leave him, sad and alone in their apartment with no money left for rent. He watched the plane come down in the Pacific, Flight 903, bound for New York, the one that did not spare a single passenger. He watched as his dreams shattered before him, his job left him, and he embraced destitution with a cold heart. He even watched himself climb this god-forsaken tower on foot, the elevators having been “under maintenance”. Several people had even shown him pleasantries on the way up. These made him feel far worse than he would have had he walked up in silence.

         That long slog up the stairway had given him even more time to think, even more time to find the demons within him and let them out. He had chosen not to think about them at the time, but now they were back, and they were chasing him. He let them come. He opened his eyes, but not until he was facing toward the sky. He did not want to see the ground; it put a timer on something which should not be timed. This sensation ought to last forever.

         He saw the sky, blue and clear and full of infinite possibility as always, only now he was a part of it. As he pondered this, the bright sky began to look more and more like an ocean, like a deep pool of ‘what ifs’ in which he often found himself drowning at the darkest times. Like, what if his drug habit hadn’t gotten the better of him and he had kept his job. What if she hadn’t won those tickets for that eternal vacation? What if, in a desperate and pivotal moment, he hadn’t stolen a friend’s wallet for drug money, only to be caught, shot in the leg, and left to die in an alleyway?

         And as he met his demons at last, they spoke to him. One with the voice of his daughter, locked in a shouting match again, almost certainly over something trivial and unimportant. One spoke with a forked tongue; a dirty, low down, scum of the earth drug dealer. This one in particular had mixed in “a little something special”. That turned out to be a smidge of battery acid, enough to make him lose his mind in public, enough to land him 30 days in that horrible, unsanitary prison. A third spoke with the voice of his old boss, a rotund fat-cat in the most literal sense. 16 hours, every day, no overtime, no excuses, or you’re fired. He was almost glad to see that job go, despite it being the one and only thing that he had left in the world, the only binding factor in his shambles of an existence.

However, one among the chaos spoke tenderly, and it was her voice. She spoke kindly. She made him feel warm. It was consolation, it was reward. He would be with her again soon enough.

He had heard once in a movie that in your last moments the best thing to do would be to contemplate your place in the universe. He tried it.

         He was a speck, at the moment, falling at terminal velocity from a structure that was both monumentally large and unfathomably insignificant. He was a bundle of atoms, or at least he thought it was atoms, held together by something or another. He was never much good with science of any sort. Besides, he had always been told that God held it all together with his love, or by some similar mechanism, or at least that was what the church had taught him as a child. He had believed it wholeheartedly.

He got to thinking about it though. The whole God thing, it didn’t make a terribly large amount of sense. Come to think of it, it made no sense whatsoever. Wouldn’t God have kept him off this dark path? And, if God was truly loving and just, would he not have saved her? No God worth his time would let something like that happen. Although it occurred to him that it would be somewhat of a bad idea to abandon any hope of entering an afterlife several seconds before dying, he felt compelled to do so anyway. He threw his beliefs down with him.

         At one point, near the terminus of his journey, he looked over to see his reflection in the windows of the tower beside him. He looked awful, of course he did, he had ever since the plane crash, but he also looked… at peace. It was at that moment that he decided that his life could have really and truly been worse. He had never been one for history either, but her did recall something about slavery, and how men were forced to work hours even worse than those he had worked, if that were at all possible, for no pay whatsoever. And he had, although very briefly, been in love, which is more than can be said for some folks. There was nothing left here for him, no regrets, nor future. He was simply at peace.

         Let death come, he thought.

         And he opened his eyes.

         And he watched as the blue sky faded into oblivion.

         And his thoughts drifted away on the wind.