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 ^{(it's beta!)}

They say that if you were to fall from fifty stories high, you wouldn't even feel the impact. They say you wouldn't even hear the shards of bone splitting from every tendon in your back and spiraling their ivory feet through your skin. They say you wouldn't even notice when your eye lids, instead of closing, lose their grip on your eyes and let go, just because of a little friction. Or that you wouldn't notice the sparks temporarily igniting the asphalt underneath your keys and belt buckle; Or that you wouldn't even taste the blood in your throat from the pressure of the fall, or the stomach acid fighting gravity to burn any tissue it can find. But speaking from experience...

You notice everything.

Right before you jump, you change your mind. Your body tenses up and your muscles all act on instinct. Your muscles learned from TV movies that they shouldn't be pushing your bones over the edge, and so in true epileptic fashion, they all go in different directions. It becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether the building is shaking you, or you are shaking the building. But the Sigmund Freud in your head rationalizes and rationalizes and rationalizes the situation. "Well, look at fashion. The models all look half dead; so if it keeps up, by this time next year dead will be the new sexy. Blue lips and blood loss will be the new lip gloss and eye liner. A gun shot will be too faux pa by June, and even a car crash will be over done by July. You're getting ahead of the game. So really, you have to jump. For fashion's sake." So you shake off the seizure you gave the building, and walk a tight rope off the lip of the building.

Right as your line of sight crosses the top row of windows, time stops. You're not so much falling as you are pacing a stair case that no one else can see. The clear banister there to steady you so that you don't trip and ruin your grand entrance from roof top to traffic. You can catch every one of the flaws that led you to the jump in the thousands of reflections making their home on the side of the building. Each freckled fat cell reminding you that you'll be the biggest thing in fashion by next year. You are reminded of how true the statement "Beauty is pain" really is, because from what you've read, dying can't be but so comfortable.

Around the fortieth floor you begin considering blacking out. Not because you’re scared, but more so because you’re tired. That’s a lot of invisible stairs to walk. (Especially considering time has been stopped now for about 200 years.) It’s at about that point that you begin to realize all the ironies in life you had never noticed before. Like the fact that the creation of the “sky scraper” is one of the greatest aids in the life of man. And yet today, a sky scraper is the end of life. We’ve invented office buildings. We’ve invented TV studios. We’ve invented hotels. All out of the knowledge that the use of this sky scraper was aiding man. And in one shaky step you just proved that the only thing we “invented” was a big concrete ladder to jump off of.

It’s not until the thirtieth floor that you forget what having skin feels like. Under an existential microscope you watch the air separate you from your human shell and out of either wisdom or hysteria you realize just how funny our pink, fleshy, calorie counted bodies really are.

Watching skin slide off of the bone is a lot like watching someone crack open the shell of a turtle and pull out the shy, naked creature from inside. You can’t even recognize it as a turtle without it’s external shell. Which raises the question, is it what’s inside that really counts? Will people remember me for my charming wit and kind heart, or my acres of organs polka-dotting Main Street?

In an exhausted stride, you find yourself regretting the jump around the twentieth floor, because at that point your heart explodes. And I mean explode in more of a literal way then a figurative one. Without the skin draped over your skeleton you can watch the heart-bomb go off. Pieces of arteries work their way into the cavities of your lungs, which is more insignificant than damaging because the air is moving too fast past your face for you to catch any in your mouth. But you can feel it building just before it explodes, and the pressure is comparable to two or three houses resting gently on your chest.

You start to miss your eye lids that were torn off at floor thirty seven because you just want to close your eyes and go to sleep so that you can wake up in one piece from this dream tomorrow morning. But the hollow sockets are stuck in a permanent, open stare. Foreshadowing the lack of sleep death has to offer you. And then...

Just when you’ve lost all hope and realized you made the biggest mistake of your life(death), it hits you. The concrete is like a much needed embrace, snapping you into your new, high fashion form. The bones that are left bare and brittle scatter on impact, taking with them any self consciousness left in you. Seeing that your flaws are a nice contrast to the dark street, you begin considering an after-death career in interior decoration. The sound is musical. The harmonizing car horns and screams all followed by the simultaneous pin drops when everyone realizes what just happened.

It’s kind of funny to think about all of the therapists you just made a fortune for. Because people don’t know what to do when they get death thrown right in their laps. It’s understandably hard to get over a home-less eye wondering into the soup you were enjoying outside of a restaurant one day; Or to get over seeing a collage of hair, skin and teeth stack up in the middle five-o’clock-traffic; or to see the inside of a femur after it found it’s way on to your windshield.

Coincidentally, minutes after the impact, the sky will imitate your breaks and tares, ripping its self open to let the rain come down in true big-screen, Hollywood-cinema fashion.

Standing over your ragged body in the falling water, you’ll scribble a note on some damp, week-old newspaper, to remember to make sure pastel’s come back in style next year when you’re the hottest thing in fashion.