On the Roof of a Seventy-Story Building

TW: Suicidal ideations

A man stands on the roof of a seventy-story building. Don't worry about him falling, this is a simulation.

Let’s start again.

A man stands on the roof of a seventy-story building. He thinks about jumping, because he doesn’t know that a holographic platform will rise up to catch him in an instant. His job as a project manager is terrible, meandering. The half-assed attempts to become a sculptor have, understandably, led to nowhere. His wife is about to leave him and he wants to beat her to it. 

There’s a piece of clay in his pocket that he plays with, pressing into unfinished shapes. It helps with his nerves. The world doesn’t seem to have a path for him except the very edge of this roof and the seductive ground. 

He lets a foot dangle off the edge.

Let’s start again.

A man stands on the roof of a seventy-story building, letting the wind whip up his shirt, through his hair. Before leaping, he remembers that poster above the employee entrance at his job. Hang In There! Despite how corporate it is, how mass-produced, he sits on the edge of the roof to consider it. What good would it do? Maybe he could hang around, if there was anyone better than a poster who cared enough to tell him that. Maybe God would, if he cried out, but the mouth of a nonbeliever makes no sound as far as He is concerned.

Underneath that poster, someone had written Abandon hope all ye who enter in crude black marker. Probably a joke from the guys taking a smoke break. He didn’t want to abandon anything. Not really. But there’s no point in trying to build huts in the midst of a never-ending desert, the daily sands of time blasting him apart like a weathered fossil. Not without rescue, without reprieve. Give him back the days when his mother would wash his back and tell him warmed-up leftovers are waiting in the microwave, before the night got darker and the world got smaller.

If he cries out to the people on the street, how many hundreds would hear him? No one, probably. When he was barely four feet tall, stomping through the woods with his neighborhood friends, letting his screams and laughter bounce through the leaves, through the ears of every animal — that’s when he had a voice, didn’t he? Maybe God hadn’t heard him back then, but those young kids who flew through the forest besides him were glad to listen. They all kept screaming and hearing each other and screaming some more. And wasn’t a voice just an outstretched palm, the need for connection turned into sound? His screams got lost somewhere in the woods, along with everything else. Like he was a slow leaf that floated off from the branch, too afraid to rejoin the others lest he be ripped apart for trying.

Start again.

A man stands on the roof of a seventy-story building. Don’t worry, it’s the last time. The sky is so blue it looks neon, with a single untamed cloud underlining the sun. He hangs a foot off the edge, and starts to let gravity’s fingers gently pull him. No one shouts for him to stop. Life is still happening at this moment. Time is waiting for him to churn the seconds into meaning, for him to decide if he’ll give this planet one more try. He fingers that piece of shapeless tacky clay in his pocket once more.

Does he have the stomach to start again, though? Perhaps this is life’s cruel repetition, an assembly of Hang In There posters meant to keep him going like a dog with a bone. The constant factory of nostalgia that creates the dreams of his life, where his sculptures are successful, where he and his wife have a kid, where the world’s potential is still unfolding in front of him instead of behind. It is a bear trap of his own invention, and he’s ready to gnaw his leg off for freedom. He just wants to see if something can change for once. If it can end.

But really, what was the difference between an end and a beginning? He yearns for the nights of possibility, but night necessitates day. The stars would get boring if they glittered all the time. A flock of young birds fly past him, their bones made from the nutrients of other long-dead creatures. Maybe this was also life in repetition.

He tries to take a step back, but being up so high for so long has thrown off his balance. He slips. There’s a hiccup in his heartbeat. His wife is still at home in bed, not yet awoken by her alarm. At least he has done the hard work for her.

Despite it all, when the holographic platform catches him a mere three feet below the edge, his gut sighs with numbing relief. He rolls onto his back and lets the impossible physics of all this go unquestioned for now, because this is salvation. The neon blue sky stares back at him, pulsing. It’s okay. It’s okay. 

Somewhere, bubbling in his throat, is a scream. When he lets it out, the vibrations against the roof of his mouth is enough to cry over because there was that voice. His voice. Maybe God heard it, maybe He didn’t. But it was there and it was undeniable. It hadn’t stayed lost in the woods.

The piece of clay is flattened in his pocket and he feverishly wants to press it into shape. And maybe it’s okay that he’s never known what the shape should be. The only way out of nostalgia’s factory is to forgive yourself after all, for all the things that have gone undone, unsaid, unfelt, unknown. Even if life seems to be a pointless simulation, keep going. It doesn’t matter. You’re here. And there is nothing more essential, more human, than someone who learns how to be here.