When I came home from my father’s house I thought I was going to have a relaxing time at home, getting my summer project done for school, making sure I had everything set and ready for my last year in high school, all the stuff that comes with the end of the summer.
My mother, being my mother, had a whole different idea though to celebrate my less then happy return.
LAS VEGAS.
Now, I’m not saying anything against the so appropriately named “Sin City” but it did occur to me that maybe I needed the vacation, just to get my mind off of somethings. I was wrong.
I hadn’t thought about all the dangers that arise in Vegas, and I definitely hadn’t been thinking about our hotel room 500 feet from solid ground.
I’ve thought about jumping before, plenty of times actually. It just seems like one of the quickest ways to commit suicide. You jump, you hit the ground, game over. But never, not EVER, had I really considering doing it until I saw the window in our room. My family had decided to go down and lay by the pool and I wanted to stay up in the room and work on my english report, but I just couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to open that window, I wanted to stand there and know that it only took one jump to end it all, to not have to worry about school, an unidentified future, a hopeless hope for a happy life that I knew wouldn’t come. It could all be over with one step off that ledge.
And so I did, I went right up to the glass window and I just stood there with the window closed, pressing my face up against the window so my nose and chin were being crushed by the titanium it was made out of. Apparently, lots of people had jumped from these windows earlier in the years. People who had lost it all gambling, who thought there lives were over because they had sat at a slot machine for days straight and spent every penny they owned. And maybe their lives were over, but I couldn’t help but think about their families. Didn’t they have any, didn’t that thought ever cross their minds?
I wish that it crossed mine more then it does, more then it ever could. Standing out there though, I felt the adrenaline rush, even with the window closed. I could look down at all the people whose lives were so much better then mine, who were grown up and knew where their lives were headed, and I felt…selfish. So much of me wants to call it quits, sometimes so badly that I dream about it, sometimes so passionately that I feel one more little thing and I could really fling myself from the window with no hesitation. but there is a part of me, half of me even, that wants to see what the future holds, that wants to go to college and have a family, the white picket fence with the dog in the yard and the neighbors who bring pie over once a week. It could be possible, if I let it be.
The Edge. Of the window, of suicide, of insanity, of my life. I am always on the very verge of letting it all go, of flying into the sky and not being afraid to come down. But I am afraid, not just to die, but to live.
I wish I could step back from edge I’m living on, but in my world, there is no where else to be.