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Falling
I have just jumped off the Lake Street Bridge and am falling to the broad Mississippi River drifting below. My back is to the river and I am looking up at the bridge and the blue sky receding. I will hit the water soon, maybe with a thunderclap resounding across the cities so that people in Starbucks and SuperAmericas and in cars and on the 35s and in offices and schools will pause to look up and wonder at the sound; maybe I will hit the water with a dull and insignificant splash. For now I am only concerned with the immediate reality of each instant moment, trying to think as fast as I fall, I am still alive now and I am still alive now and I am still alive now...
A face peering over the bridge recedes also with the bridge and the sky. I heard the screech as I leapt. He or she knows that calling for help is useless because this is a moment that exists in the instant. So instant it expands to encompass all of time and all our lives. That face on the bridge, frozen, can only sense this, because to know it is to be falling as I am now. I look at that face, dark speck against the wide, bright blue, and I wonder who it is. The last person I will see, that I can't see. How long will it remain on the bridge, looking down? I wonder what that face will say afterwards. Will it get on its cell-phone and call the person closest to it, saying, 'You won't believe what I saw! I saw a guy jump off a bridge today'? Is that what is unbelievable, that a guy jumped off a bridge? Doesn't it happen all the time, if mostly when people aren't watching? I look at that face and think, Isn't the unbelievable thing the experience that can be known only once, if that, in this lifetime? I wonder if the face will ever wonder what it's like. I wonder if that face will ever know what it is like to feel in each instant still alive now still alive now still alive now...
Now I can hear the river almost directly below me. It gets so loud so fast. My last bit of self-preservation says it might not be too late to turn, enter the water feet first, painful, but perhaps I can still survive. Others have done it, survived the fall off a bridge into a river. I read about them before I came, an effort to work up some kind of courage or something. People wanted to know why they did it, why they felt they had to jump. We lost our house and I didn't want to jump. We were okay with renting again. She lost her job and I didn't want to jump. We had savings, things would be all right, it wasn't the first time bad things happened. I lost her and I didn't want to jump. I remember a line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's, “Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement—discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.” My brother called the other day and asked if I was okay. I realized then that the feeling that has stuck with me all my life will never go away. But now there's not even time to think of that anymore; the feeling has been silenced by this stronger one. Why does it take so much? The river and the world are ascending like an elevator as though I am the one held in space and I can't even think of why I jumped because there is only time to consider being still alive still alive still alive.
We shouldn't all jump off of bridges. I agree with this sentiment. Common sense says that we do not have to jump off bridges to feel alive in the moment, because if we all did there would be no one left to continue on with life. Not like this, is all I can reply, we will still never feel it like this. Even I certainly did not expect it with what brought me to the bridge in the first place. Only now it comes, in such an impossible moment of sustained and real inevitability. No surviving. This is it. Time and space collapse in on each other and all I know as I fall, about to hit the water, is the only word that tears through my mind like the furious wind at my clothes and ears, a deafening sound that denies the face's cries for help, the sounds of the city, my own pain—alive alive alive...