As I pass from window to window, I see each pane reflecting my limp, resigned body as it plummets to the sidewalk below. It all feels relatively pedestrian and surely demonstrative, this act. But it also seems, if anything, resolutely calculated and derived from utter sincerity.

          I had heard from a shrink that men kill themselves violently. Like, say, they’ll drive their Buick into a tree at seventy miles traveled per hour. This same shrink said that women tend to suicide “less violently.” She went on to cite a non-violent means of suicide, but I immediately imagined how I might do it if I were one of those women in her statistics. Perhaps, I thought, I could just stare at a small spot in the wall until my psyche gravitated, unfettered, toward it. And then, perhaps, when my psyche did finally make some sort of contact, that I would be swallowed whole by my own “female” indecisiveness on the matter.
          Rather, I’ve hurled myself off the top of a building. At first, the feeling was something totally liberating, but, as I’m beginning to realize, there’s something else to this: the insurance of inevitability. Granted, there is one way out. I believe, and have allowed myself to believe for the week before I began making the proper preparations for this final event, that if I allow myself a moment of doubt on the subject of my suicide that more than two hundred down mattresses will materialize beneath me, that they will break my fall.

          My motivations for suicide are rather simple, and all resultant of a simple concept: I was empty like Richard’s love for me was empty. His love for me was empty the way a rock star kisses a music video actor in a music video. Yes, empty. Richard showed me this emptiness with all of his infidelities. Yes, empty. Like how a scientist says that when you touch you don’t actually touch, but that there’s this buffer of oxygen and pollutant particles between a finger and the nape of your neck. That space, that indistinct physicality between skin and skin, that is the emptiness since supplanted in the love Richard has for me.

          Bear in mind that I didn’t choose a building of monolithic height. I just found something tall enough to properly end my small life, and even then added some extra stories for good measure. Still, I’m experiencing a retrogressive desire for something with more vertical grandiosity, more elegiac design. I think if I was dropping from a stronger, more established height that those mattresses might not save me at all. And, thusly, I would have to do this. Perhaps, and I could have done so, in hindsight, I would have felt as though I’d leapt from a castle, much deeper in the air above.

          After three stories, a window bares me visual spree. My eyes venture onto the daily life of some fair young man, not more than thirty years old.
          He has a pencil in his left hand.
          There is a monitor in his office that, I could swear, is tracking my pro-violent descent onto the sidewalk below. Who would have thought?

          I should remark that if my life had been any emptier than it was before my decision-if it were possible-than it might have killed itself on its own accord. I can see it happen past-presently: like a skinny avocado devoured by its pit, or a seedless watermelon developing genitals and hemorrhaging on a wooden stand. These are the ways I try to teach myself emptiness, try to explain it into the visual grandeur that it did thusly manifest in my pre-suicidal brain.
          The building that I’ve given myself away to has a generous brick relief that spells “emptiness” repeatedly inside of my eyes. Yes, it reads “emptiness” until finally it reads “mattresses” again and again in crescent patterns, as if holding darkly onto some limb of preternatural countermeasure within my heart.
          It seems to say, softly like how an adding-machine might if it had such gracious chords, “Eleanor, give up on this idea,” or, “Eleanor, are you so sure?” And although it would seem that this is something coming from inside of me, it still even smells like the building’s wall and windows personified through voice.
          Surely, you’re aware, I say to the wall and windows, that the mattresses beneath me will only come forth if I betray my strict constitution with a second guess.
          The Wall and Windows do not respond.
          If I do decide to acquiesce, then perhaps I should register the visuals of post-suicidal doubt within the volumes of emptiness inside of me, because, You, Walls and Windows, I say, your kindness is more generously engendered than that of this adulterous world to which you’ve been birthed.
          They again do not respond. Rather, they seem to smile some kind of knowing smile.
          And yet, I then whisper as I smell the way my lungs might smell if they were spread arbitrarily over the sidewalk, I already long for the fallacy of touch.