I let go.

At that exact second the final remnants of dignity supposedly left me, carried away by the gust created when my feet, toes, then balls, then heels, parted with the roof. As if, with my shoes planted firmly, I had hidden my insecurities in-between the makeshift rubber and tar compact.

Thus, began the longest fast fall I would ever experience.

What I saw first were the tops of buildings surrounding me from all directions. Each connected to slabs of stone and brick of varying colors. A spaced out collection of cleanly cut angles.

On each building, placed apart from each other at even intervals, were windows pale yellow and bright white. Some housed life, while others sat vacant, filled with absence.


No longer caring about first impressions, I peered into each as I passed.

Like life imitating film, snapshots of the people in those windows flooded my mind. Each glimpse, because glimpses were all I could manage, was so brief, that it showed human life frozen, almost statuesque.


Each time I looked in, I saw something that I could’ve been doing at the moment.

A man sits at his desk, signing papers. Another waltzes around his kitchen.

Some minor contribution I could have been making to society, or at least, something I could’ve been doing that would better my own happiness.

A woman lies on her couch, mindlessly staring at the television.


At that point I was supposed to have regrets, second thoughts, remorse. But, instead, a sudden surge of disgust rose within me. From the outside, looking in, viewing one mechanical, dull, action after another, I realized that they were not the perfect patrons they probably projected themselves to be. Tricked into the comfort of routine, they had lost the ability to do things that were not already planned out for them on a schedule. They had destroyed what it meant to live.

In other words, the city looked beautiful. It was the flood of people that blemished the scene.



At 12:45 PM the next day, in some superbly hidden section in the back of every newspaper, anyone who was no one learned that the ground rose to the occasion.