Fall
Standing on the edge of the roof I watched as the cars passed bellow. Each one's colours seemed to fade into the next as I tried to keep my vision from blurring in the dark night air. How many had I taken? I couldn't quite remember, but the empty pill bottle was lying on the roof just a few feet away from where I stood. As I closed my eyes the cold brisk breeze that signaled fall was coming caught my hair and tossed it around my face, thrashing at my cold skin and causing tendrils of pain to surge through me. "Fall." I muttered to myself as I exhaled deeply. The cold air seemed to freeze in my lungs making it hard to let out. "Fall." I whispered softer as my eyes opened, taking in the city lights around me that blinked and moved in the pitch black darkness Everything around me was perfectly dull. Everything was the same. Every day was a replayed version of the last and I couldn't find anything to bring me joy. Every day I failed. I failed them. I failed myself. I failed life. How do you think that feels? Being the failure? Being the let down? Being the expectation that never really comes true? That was all I was ... I was nothing. I was the pitch black night, the cold air, the dark street beneath my feet that called me. It beckoned to me and how was I supposed to refuse? "Fall." I mouthed, my lips too cold to form the word properly now as I closed my eyes once again letting the sounds of the city envelope me. Take me away ... Show me there is something else. Something better. Show me an open door. I beg you ... but no matter how I begged, pleaded, or prayed, I couldn't find a reason. Not a single reason.
"Thirty?" my mind flashed back to that moment. The moment I sat behind my desk, eyes wide and pleading ... Pleading with myself. I tended to do that, but I never won. I was my own worst enemy and there was no way I would ever defeat that. "Thirty!" this time my voice was higher, less surprised and more distraught. There, sitting in front of me on that bright screen were thirty reasons I hated myself, but not a single reason I liked myself. How had it come to this? How had I gotten here? Suddenly my eyes opened and I was standing on the ledge again, fighting back the tears that stung my eyes and burned my throat. Fighting back the urge to jump. To fall. To Just let go ... All it takes is one second, one step and I would never get the chance to fight again. I would be gone. Gone like the leaves on every tree when fall came. Gone ... Gone. Gone! But free ... Would I be free? What is free? Is free being numb and dead? Or is free being tormented and alive? Why couldn't free be happy? Why couldn't free be kind? Why couldn't I just step off the ledge and die? Taking a deep breath that froze the second it touched my lungs, I shifted my foot outwards, dangling it over the edge. But just as I always did, I found a reason to fear death. In the very last second, as it looked me straight in the eyes, I recoiled, like a child recoiling from a fire. In that second, as my foot dangled dangerously outwards, I found that I feared the after life. Heaven and Hell ... did it matter which one I went to? I feared death because Hell was torment. It was pure pain and suffering, just as life had been, just worse ... Oh, I could only imagine how much worse. But as I thought of Hell my mind drifted to Heaven and I wondered how eternity would fair. I'd feared eternity forever. I was not one to see ever lasting life as a blessing, instead it seemed a daunting curse. Not for the way you'd lose your loved ones or your friends, but for the way you could never end your suffering. It would never end. You could never go to sleep knowing you may not wake up. You could never wonder when death would great you. You couldn't even wait for old age to take you. Oh ... eternity seemed like suffering in and of itself. "Fall." I said firmly as my eyes glared down at the street beneath me, the cars passed, not noticing the person standing high above them. "Fall." it was the season where death came and took every leaf from off the trees. It stripped them of their majesty and cast them to the earth as if they were nothing. "Fall." it was what I could never do and it was what I could never be ... I could never be the tree that survived the cold months, surviving day after day with no hope in sight, just to find that their leaves returned with more splendor than before. No. I could never be that tree.
Stepping away from the edge I kicked the empty bottle of pills away from me with an angry glare. Tears threatened to spill over as I fell to the floor, my knees hitting solid stone and my hands slamming down hard enough to tear the skin away from my palms. I couldn't fall. I couldn't breath. I couldn't find a reason to live yet I always did ... Why? Why was this what I was destined to be? Life terrified me so I embraced death, yet every time I went to meet him my mind always pulled me back ... It always had a way of making me scared to die. A way of making death seem worse than life. It was my worst enemy and yet it whispered slowly, softly, in my ear "You are the fall.".