He stood at the very edge, tentatively peering down over the rim into the yawning abyss... inwardly fighting an inexplicable urge to jump.
The French have a deceptively elegant phrase for it, much like most things French; L'appel du vide. "The call of the void". It speaks of those self-destructive urges that sometimes creep into your mind as you contemplate a particularly vexing dilemma.
Case-in-point; standing on the precipice and looking down over the edge, and -for a few wild seconds- wondering how it would feel like to jump... that sudden mad urge to make a leap of faith into the unfathomable depths below.
At its core, the decision is not logical. No sober person with the self-preservation instincts of a carrot would jump without harboring some serious suicidal tendencies, so this urge cannot be analysed logically... the same as love, ironically, which is the very reason he found himself in that dilemma. Or was it lust? Aren't they essentially the same? Let's get real for a second; strip away all the sentimentality from love and you're left with lust; the lust of body for body and the lust of mind for mind... When both happen to coincide we call it love, but to put love on a pedestal and forget where it ultimately stems from, we risk living in a fairy-tale world; ungrounded in messy, ugly, sinful reality.
He didn't know what he was waiting for... A sign, an epiphany, a message from the heavens? Those tend to be in rather short supply for lucid individuals, and life was rarely that simple... in any case, it would be a very cynical God indeed who would inspire him to jump. At that point, he would have even welcomed a shove in either direction to spare him from having to make the decision himself, but alas, the decision was his and his alone, and he would have to make up his mind soon and live with the consequences.
He stood there for what seemed like days but were probably a few seconds, contemplating the nature of what lay beneath his feet. He could pretend that the jump would not kill him. The darkness could be an illusion... And why not? The human mind is a very powerful machine which evolution has upgraded to near perfection, but the biggest weakness (and ironically, the biggest strength) of the human brain is its inability to accept its own limits. In order to plug in the gaps in its knowledge, the brain would make certain assumptions to fool itself into getting that feeling of smug superiority it loves so much.
In other words, specifically in his case, since he could not physically see the bottom of the pit, his brain chose to make the assumption that the intense darkness meant the pit was bottomless or very deep... and while this is a valid assumption to make, it is not necessarily true. It could be a very small drop into a shallow, poorly-lit canyon he would easily climb back out of, having finally confronted his doubts and got rid of the skeletons in his closet.
But what if it was as deep as his brain had warned him? Once he went over the edge, there would be no coming back... and much like Schrodinger's cat, he would be both alive and dead until he found the ground one way or another. He could tumble through the darkness; down, down, down... eternally flailing in limbo, eventually wishing for even a hard landing that would end his miserable existence and put his mind at ease. Small solace it would seem to him then, to think that he confronted his demons and laid them to rest... for he would have condemned himself to a painful unnecessary death, swiftly followed by eternal damnation. "Getting closure" would hardly be worth that, would it?
And so there he stood, ponderously considering his options, all the while dimly aware of the storm building in the background. Sooner or later, the winds would grow strong enough to throw him one way or another, and unless he truly wanted the decision to be made for him -which besides making him feel feel weak and indecisive would also make him lose his self-respect- he would have to make a choice.
There was no denying that he wanted to jump. He could even say that he needed to jump in order to move on once and for all... but it was not a question of wants or needs. It was a question of character. Ultimately, he was choosing who he wanted to be as a person; did he want to be the person who would jump off the edge of a cliff when he felt the urge to, or did he want to be a calculating person who would make the best possible decision with the information he had? Did he want to be a man of convictions, or give in to whims and seek happiness wherever he could find it? His was the eternal dilemma of heart versus brain; lust versus logic; happiness versus principles; impulsiveness versus cautious premeditation.
He stood there until the end of time, unable to decide.
************
I'm writing this at the beach, where I thought the soothing sound of the crashing waves would give me a sense of clarity and make my choice easier. It's been two days, and I am still on the brink, no closer to making a decision.
UPDATE- I stepped back from the brink for now.
