Jake was standing on a ledge on his eighth floor balcony. He glanced down at the vast emptiness below him.
It's always said that a man's whole life flashes before his eyes in those few moments before he enters the never-ending darkness that we've come to know as death.
It's not true. Only the important bits do.
As Jake glanced down again, his mind wandered. One second, he was standing there on his balcony, blinded by tears, oblivious to worldly concerns, resolved to do what he thought he had to do, almost at peace. The next, he was thinking of the headlines of his life...
The first thing he thought of was his family. It'd been years since he last spoke to his father. They'd been fighting so much over the past few years that Jake stopped showing up at his parents' place for Thanksgivings and Christmas. He was always telling him what to do and Jake was getting sick and tired of being told by his own dad that he'd thought his son would be married with a decent job and a couple of kids by the time he was thirty. He was sick of constantly being compared to his older brother, his parents' little pet. He was a brain surgeon, constantly gaining good-will, who had his own clinic and was already working on several postgraduate studies by the time he was 35. How could Jake hope to compare with that, given that he'd dropped out of high school thinking that his band still had a chance, then when he realized that it really didn't, he took a part-time job tending a bar and now it was his 28th birthday and he hadn't achieved anything with his life? His brother hadn't even bothered to call him for years except to boast that he now had a second son with his wife Jenna and to fill him in on the various achievements he'd been making. His mother was the only one who still called him, although she too brought up the issue of his life and his marriage eventually. No one understood him.
Jake wondered what his family would think if they saw them there, about to end his own life. "They'd probably start thinking how wrong they were and remember what a nice son I'd been" He thought bitterly. Somehow he'd gone from being his parents' favorite to being the loser. They didn't know about all the times he nearly went to blows with his brother when he ate the last bit of chocolate cake in the fridge when Mom still hadn't had a chance to taste it, or the times that he would cancel plans with his girlfriend to spend some quality time with his dad, without telling him about it, having a few beers and watching the Knicks game on TV. All they saw was a bartender who was almost thirty, with commitment issues and a girlfriend they hated, as opposed to a brilliant 35 year old surgeon who had his own patented surgery tool. They saw two beautiful grandchildren who filled their house with the sound of laughter when they went to visit for Christmas. So much laughter that their other loser son was forgotten. Life was so unfair.
A gust of wind rippled his coat, bringing him back to his real whereabouts.
Then, he started thinking of his girlfriend. They'd been together ever since high school, with the difference being that she'd actually continued her education and graduated from college with a bachelor in management. She worked in a bank, and was very close to getting her first managerial position. How did it come down to this? He remembered one night when they were still just a few weeks into their relationship, as they lay beside each other on the grass in his backyard, staring at the stars. He smiled in spite of himself as he remembered how a grasshopper the size of his finger had hopped in her hair, and how she'd screamed as though on fire and ran around, running her hands through her hair, shrieking with disgust. Loretta was always afraid of bugs. It took him close to an hour to calm her down again and convince her to lay back in the grass and relax. After a while when she was back to normal, she'd kissed him and made him promise he would never leave her, and dozed off 5 minutes later in his arms. He took off his jacket as gently as possible in order not to wake her, and covered her so she wouldn't get cold. Only then had he allowed himself to sleep. It was the most romantic night of his life...How had it come from this, to her screaming in his face that she never'd wanted to see him again? She'd claimed that he was a failure, that she'd been waiting for so long for him to get a grip on himself and actually get a decent job with normal working hours and a desk so she could know that this was going somewhere and that they could actually get married one day. That was when he freaked out due to his commitment issues, and they had a shouting match ending with her breaking up with him and him storming out of her place. He hoped she would cry her eyes out when she realized he was dead. That was just one night ago. She would probably go mad with grief, and she deserved it. He'd promised to never leave her, but he kept the promise. She left him.
The day was crazy silent. It was raining, and dark.. the cloud cover was unbroken even by the tiniest rays of sunlight, and it was eerily silent... The silence of a graveyard at three am when there were no visitors except hobos who had nowhere else to be. His phone was ringing. He started laughing hysterically.. how ironically insignificant a phone-call could be when you were about to cast your life away. Just out of curiosity, he got out his phone to see who it was. It was his best friend Sam. He flung his phone away in anger. Life wasn't fair. Dimly, he heard the sound of his phone crashing into a million tiny pieces on the ground below.
Sam was also his friend since high school. like Loretta, he also had a flourishing career as a real estate agent, due to the fact that he'd actually gone through with his education. He recalled bitterly the huge fight they'd had a week ago. His whole life was falling apart, with all those close to him turning against him. Everyone claimed they cared about him, but they kept fighting with him over his career. Sam was no different. The conversation had started innocently as Sam told him about the promotion he'd recently gotten, and Jake congratulated him. before long, Sam was already offering him a job and promising that he could rise very high in this field because all it took was some logic and a bit of experience with business. When Jake replied jokingly that his bar-tending job got him to meet drunken hot chicks on a daily basis, willing to sleep with him more often than not, Sam snapped. He said that Jake was not a responsible human being, that his life was wasting away and that he had achieved virtually nothing since his high school days.Sam had actually been the vocalist in their band, but when they broke up the band after they'd realized that it was a futile effort, he'd went ahead and looked for a job "like a man", he said. He said that it was about time he took control of his life and stopped being so passive. Jake punched him in the face and walked away. That was the first time he'd called since.. Jake suspected that he was the one who'd turned his girlfriend against him. Sam was the older brother he'd always wished for, rather than that inflate-a-head brother he had who gloated with every breath he took. Oh, the number of times they pulled all-nighters working on their music and practicing relentlessly. All the nights they got crazy drunk and woke up in another county. All the times they broke the speed limit and gotten arrested, only to be bailed out by one of their two other best friends, Lisa and Carine. All the times all four of them woke up in the same bed, having no idea how they got there, and all the times he'd tested Sam on stuff he didn't understand at all before one of his big exams. Life wasn't fair.
And suddenly, a cloud moved and the sun shone bright. Just like that, the spell was broken.
He remembered the day that his dad had taken him fishing when he was six. His dad had caught a beautiful orange Angler fish, and Jake was reduced to tears because he couldn't understand why his dad's taken this creature's life without even intending to eat it. That day, his dad calmed him down and promised he would never go fishing again. And he'd kept his promise to that day.
He remembered the time he got a very bad case of the flu, and his mom stayed up with him all night, sleepless with anxiety. When he'd told her how uncomfortable he was, she started reading him his favorite Harry Potter book. She had to read through 50 pages before he went to sleep, although she hated the series to begin with.
He remembered that one time when he went back home at dawn after a particularly long shift at the bar. it was the dawn of his birthday, but seeing as his biological clock was messed up and he slept at day and woke up at night, he hadn't realized it was his birthday. He'd gone home to find all of his family, his brother, Sam, Lisa and Carine and all of their other friends at his place, throwing him a surprise party even though by all rights they should have been asleep to be able to wake up for their jobs tomorrow. He'd been amazed at the trouble they'd gone through to give him their support on his birthday at such an ungodly hour. That night, Loretta had actually bought him a car. A used, second-hand car, but a car nevertheless, because he was always complaining of the long walks back home from the bar every night.
Maybe dad fought with him because he couldn't stand to see him waste his life when he had so much potential. Maybe he'd wanted to see him have his own kids and hold them in his arms and play with them in his last days. Maybe his mom's only dream was to make sure her youngest son would live a better life than her own and at a better social standard. Even his brother, maybe he'd called him not to boast, but to try and urge him to let him help Jake find a job. Maybe Loretta wanted to see him in a safe job because she cared about him and wanted to get married to him and raise his kids some day. Maybe Sam wanted to see his best friend do exactly that, and see his own kids grow up to be Jake's kids best friends and maybe one day the two old couples would spend their days in the terrace playing bridge.
And then the cloud was back, plunging the world again into the darkness of the crypts.
He took one foot off the ledge. And he jumped.
But in which direction? Into the cold blackness under his feet, or back into his balcony so he would get himself warm and start calling the people that mattered, to make amends?
Let's leave that to your imagination.
It's always said that a man's whole life flashes before his eyes in those few moments before he enters the never-ending darkness that we've come to know as death.
It's not true. Only the important bits do.
As Jake glanced down again, his mind wandered. One second, he was standing there on his balcony, blinded by tears, oblivious to worldly concerns, resolved to do what he thought he had to do, almost at peace. The next, he was thinking of the headlines of his life...
The first thing he thought of was his family. It'd been years since he last spoke to his father. They'd been fighting so much over the past few years that Jake stopped showing up at his parents' place for Thanksgivings and Christmas. He was always telling him what to do and Jake was getting sick and tired of being told by his own dad that he'd thought his son would be married with a decent job and a couple of kids by the time he was thirty. He was sick of constantly being compared to his older brother, his parents' little pet. He was a brain surgeon, constantly gaining good-will, who had his own clinic and was already working on several postgraduate studies by the time he was 35. How could Jake hope to compare with that, given that he'd dropped out of high school thinking that his band still had a chance, then when he realized that it really didn't, he took a part-time job tending a bar and now it was his 28th birthday and he hadn't achieved anything with his life? His brother hadn't even bothered to call him for years except to boast that he now had a second son with his wife Jenna and to fill him in on the various achievements he'd been making. His mother was the only one who still called him, although she too brought up the issue of his life and his marriage eventually. No one understood him.
Jake wondered what his family would think if they saw them there, about to end his own life. "They'd probably start thinking how wrong they were and remember what a nice son I'd been" He thought bitterly. Somehow he'd gone from being his parents' favorite to being the loser. They didn't know about all the times he nearly went to blows with his brother when he ate the last bit of chocolate cake in the fridge when Mom still hadn't had a chance to taste it, or the times that he would cancel plans with his girlfriend to spend some quality time with his dad, without telling him about it, having a few beers and watching the Knicks game on TV. All they saw was a bartender who was almost thirty, with commitment issues and a girlfriend they hated, as opposed to a brilliant 35 year old surgeon who had his own patented surgery tool. They saw two beautiful grandchildren who filled their house with the sound of laughter when they went to visit for Christmas. So much laughter that their other loser son was forgotten. Life was so unfair.
A gust of wind rippled his coat, bringing him back to his real whereabouts.
Then, he started thinking of his girlfriend. They'd been together ever since high school, with the difference being that she'd actually continued her education and graduated from college with a bachelor in management. She worked in a bank, and was very close to getting her first managerial position. How did it come down to this? He remembered one night when they were still just a few weeks into their relationship, as they lay beside each other on the grass in his backyard, staring at the stars. He smiled in spite of himself as he remembered how a grasshopper the size of his finger had hopped in her hair, and how she'd screamed as though on fire and ran around, running her hands through her hair, shrieking with disgust. Loretta was always afraid of bugs. It took him close to an hour to calm her down again and convince her to lay back in the grass and relax. After a while when she was back to normal, she'd kissed him and made him promise he would never leave her, and dozed off 5 minutes later in his arms. He took off his jacket as gently as possible in order not to wake her, and covered her so she wouldn't get cold. Only then had he allowed himself to sleep. It was the most romantic night of his life...How had it come from this, to her screaming in his face that she never'd wanted to see him again? She'd claimed that he was a failure, that she'd been waiting for so long for him to get a grip on himself and actually get a decent job with normal working hours and a desk so she could know that this was going somewhere and that they could actually get married one day. That was when he freaked out due to his commitment issues, and they had a shouting match ending with her breaking up with him and him storming out of her place. He hoped she would cry her eyes out when she realized he was dead. That was just one night ago. She would probably go mad with grief, and she deserved it. He'd promised to never leave her, but he kept the promise. She left him.
The day was crazy silent. It was raining, and dark.. the cloud cover was unbroken even by the tiniest rays of sunlight, and it was eerily silent... The silence of a graveyard at three am when there were no visitors except hobos who had nowhere else to be. His phone was ringing. He started laughing hysterically.. how ironically insignificant a phone-call could be when you were about to cast your life away. Just out of curiosity, he got out his phone to see who it was. It was his best friend Sam. He flung his phone away in anger. Life wasn't fair. Dimly, he heard the sound of his phone crashing into a million tiny pieces on the ground below.
Sam was also his friend since high school. like Loretta, he also had a flourishing career as a real estate agent, due to the fact that he'd actually gone through with his education. He recalled bitterly the huge fight they'd had a week ago. His whole life was falling apart, with all those close to him turning against him. Everyone claimed they cared about him, but they kept fighting with him over his career. Sam was no different. The conversation had started innocently as Sam told him about the promotion he'd recently gotten, and Jake congratulated him. before long, Sam was already offering him a job and promising that he could rise very high in this field because all it took was some logic and a bit of experience with business. When Jake replied jokingly that his bar-tending job got him to meet drunken hot chicks on a daily basis, willing to sleep with him more often than not, Sam snapped. He said that Jake was not a responsible human being, that his life was wasting away and that he had achieved virtually nothing since his high school days.Sam had actually been the vocalist in their band, but when they broke up the band after they'd realized that it was a futile effort, he'd went ahead and looked for a job "like a man", he said. He said that it was about time he took control of his life and stopped being so passive. Jake punched him in the face and walked away. That was the first time he'd called since.. Jake suspected that he was the one who'd turned his girlfriend against him. Sam was the older brother he'd always wished for, rather than that inflate-a-head brother he had who gloated with every breath he took. Oh, the number of times they pulled all-nighters working on their music and practicing relentlessly. All the nights they got crazy drunk and woke up in another county. All the times they broke the speed limit and gotten arrested, only to be bailed out by one of their two other best friends, Lisa and Carine. All the times all four of them woke up in the same bed, having no idea how they got there, and all the times he'd tested Sam on stuff he didn't understand at all before one of his big exams. Life wasn't fair.
And suddenly, a cloud moved and the sun shone bright. Just like that, the spell was broken.
He remembered the day that his dad had taken him fishing when he was six. His dad had caught a beautiful orange Angler fish, and Jake was reduced to tears because he couldn't understand why his dad's taken this creature's life without even intending to eat it. That day, his dad calmed him down and promised he would never go fishing again. And he'd kept his promise to that day.
He remembered the time he got a very bad case of the flu, and his mom stayed up with him all night, sleepless with anxiety. When he'd told her how uncomfortable he was, she started reading him his favorite Harry Potter book. She had to read through 50 pages before he went to sleep, although she hated the series to begin with.
He remembered that one time when he went back home at dawn after a particularly long shift at the bar. it was the dawn of his birthday, but seeing as his biological clock was messed up and he slept at day and woke up at night, he hadn't realized it was his birthday. He'd gone home to find all of his family, his brother, Sam, Lisa and Carine and all of their other friends at his place, throwing him a surprise party even though by all rights they should have been asleep to be able to wake up for their jobs tomorrow. He'd been amazed at the trouble they'd gone through to give him their support on his birthday at such an ungodly hour. That night, Loretta had actually bought him a car. A used, second-hand car, but a car nevertheless, because he was always complaining of the long walks back home from the bar every night.
Maybe dad fought with him because he couldn't stand to see him waste his life when he had so much potential. Maybe he'd wanted to see him have his own kids and hold them in his arms and play with them in his last days. Maybe his mom's only dream was to make sure her youngest son would live a better life than her own and at a better social standard. Even his brother, maybe he'd called him not to boast, but to try and urge him to let him help Jake find a job. Maybe Loretta wanted to see him in a safe job because she cared about him and wanted to get married to him and raise his kids some day. Maybe Sam wanted to see his best friend do exactly that, and see his own kids grow up to be Jake's kids best friends and maybe one day the two old couples would spend their days in the terrace playing bridge.
And then the cloud was back, plunging the world again into the darkness of the crypts.
He took one foot off the ledge. And he jumped.
But in which direction? Into the cold blackness under his feet, or back into his balcony so he would get himself warm and start calling the people that mattered, to make amends?
Let's leave that to your imagination.
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