If I could use words to describe that day, I would only use one.

'Cold'.

I can still feel the rain on my skin and hair.

My lungs contracting and pushing back against me.

The pressure on my right shoulder from the backpack I never wore right.

The shoes I was laying out beside the rail.

Most of all, I can still feel that oppressive numbness. The numbness that kept me docile, the same numbness that caused every nerve in my body to fire against any swelling actions and emotions that didn't lead directly toward my own demise. The numbness borne of apathy and perpetuated by a suffocating guilt I had drowned myself in, one too deep to claw myself up from. It felt inane, like a child slamming a door so their mother couldn't talk to them; a penultimate statement I couldn't walk away from for the sake of my own pride. A statement that wasn't even sincere.

That might have been why I didn’t jump.

But I don't know. I doubt that I ever will. But beyond the crippling numbness, beyond the uncaring eternity I was facing down, even beyond the comfort of what I had tried to leave behind. Beyond that all something spoke to my heart in truths I couldn't understand in my head.

It intrigued me. And it told me that I had something, or perhaps a promised nothing, to live for. In the same vein, it told me I had something to die for. A promise of release that wouldn’t, couldn’t come here.

I was never a religious man- if one could call someone of my age a man- but I, now more than ever, consider the possibility that that feeling was unnatural. Rather than the final cries of my heart, that it was a message of fate or destiny or something just as disheartening.

I stepped forward. And then again, and then again. Every concurrent inch built up into a wave which sought to stifle that defiant warmth. Every step brought me closer to the chilling draft of oblivion that tumbled off the edge of the old tower. Every step brought me closer to becoming one with the world.

I looked over the edge and my vision swam.

I wanted to go through with it, and I wanted it to be her fault. If not hers, then existence's for pushing her to the beyond. And most of all I wanted to prove her right. I wanted to follow some of her first words as my last.

'Die in the company of the life you lived.'

I think I realized that all of... 'that', it wasn't what she meant. Or maybe remembered would have been a better term.

It was odd, how after you change, for better or for worse, the details become blurred. Thinking back to then, even as I try to describe it, it just comes up as a mishmash of emotions.

No revelations, no realizations, no thoughts and no new beginnings. It was mere sensation.

The sort of gestalt emotional and physical experience that drives one toward or away from asking 'why?'. a feeling of flux and unsurety and confusion and grasping-at-strawsiness that leaves you wanting more. The heralding of a new trajectory, only an impetus to seek more. Something all too easy to ignore and back away from.

The things I learned past that day still find it hard to seek purchase upon its happenings. Turning points sought realizations, but they weren't that kind of decision.

Not knowing why or what you learned despite having learned is one of the most frustrating flaws of any sapient design. I've not found anyone who's disagreed. And, trust me, I've looked.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

So I'm still not sure I really know if she or I or anyone else is right about these things. I was never given a sort of self-assurance that would assuage these doubts. Once again, it was only a direction, a vector.

Honestly, it was really all that I could ask for. Like an existential participation trophy. But I was many things, and selfish was- *is*- most certaintly one of them.

I now know more about these things than I did, but I never did find out what it was that held me back from the edge of eternity.

I somehow braced myself for more and more of the freezing cold, my mind and soul frostbitten and dilapidated. Just to hold tighter onto the aimless endlessness I would always need to sift my way through.

Nothing could be easy. Even ending it all was hard. Not taking that step was even harder. Taking that next breath and every breath thereafter was the most difficult thing I had ever done.

Suffice it to say, I was pissed. And this bout of not-so-righteous fury may have primed me for what would come next. Just for the final tipping of the scales that came of it.

I shed the things I had taken along, the life I intended to die alongside. That is to say, I shrugged off my bag to bask in the totality of it all.

I heard her dice clack in there. Statistically, I rolled at least one natural 20.

Despite myself, I smiled, and the numbness remained strong. It didn't get easier, but I found energy that I by all means should not have had. It burned with the warmth of everything I had loved. Or, as the familiarity of it alluded to, still did.

“Alright, you win. This is your last chance, alright?” I pleaded softly to nobody in particular.

I think the fucker took it as a challenge.

In the very next moment, as I turned to go pick up the dice for reasons I told myself I'd figure out later, I saw the world go entirely dark.

I figured it was a city-wide power outage, and the sky tearing apart in the next moment was just light pollution receding to give the (un?)lucky inhabitants of the area a rare view of the starlight our world was always meant to be plunged in.

Possibly a terrorist attack or something, I figured, if it was on that scale.

Objectively terrifying, but overall unconcerning to me in that moment. After all, I was still in a place where I could go out on my own terms.

Until I remembered that wasn’t at all how light pollution worked. Then the rain stopped. Then the sky opened from a line across the night sky to a swirling array of colors and objects I had never seen or dared to imagine.

Then the screams began, only to be drowned out in the world we had just learned was a hell of a lot larger than we could have ever known.

"You have to be fucking kidding me."

—

Before anything else could happen, with zero fanfare, I was simply there. A boundless midday sky lay above and below me. There were two suns in the sky, both steadily shuffling toward the horizon where they would intersect. I appeared to be floating in a likely astronomically impossible sky, being without a planet to stand on.

At first, I thought I was dead, having gotten my wish in an apocalyptic event of a sort.

I realized the wish granted to me was a far deeper one when I felt the ground beneath my feet. I was not standing on sky. The midday sunlight reflecting in full on the endless mirror of a flat gave away the fact that I was only spirited away to wherever here was.

Yes, I had somehow arrived in a salt flat. The very same biome you see in photos on travel blogs that, when visited, disappoint you with their imperfection. This one differed, however, in that it was fantastically clear. My tentative footsteps created the only ripples I could observe in the reflection, and even then, I could barely notice the disturbance when I stepped even a few feet away.

It was difficult to pinpoint the emotion that I was feeling, even moreso than the rest of the day. It was some bizarre mixture of self-hatred, confusion, aimlessness, disbelief, excitement, adolescent defiance, and fear that canceled out into a paralyzing stream of tears running down my face.

I wiped myself off, still wet and chilly and alone and shaking. I was- am- many things, and one of those was/is a pretty sore loser.

So there I was, sobbing with a wholeheartedly neutral expression, completely without regard for my own safety. I bent down buried the single dice I had carried in my hand- which, feeling it now, seemed to be weighted- beneath the artificial ground-sky.

'Have it your way,' I mentally spat at Nobody In Particular, 'This is still your last chance.'

Maybe it would be more defiant to pick up where I had left off and end it. My morbid curiosity and the warmth from the heart roaring in my chest kept that train of thought beyond any real consideration.

I didn’t stop myself to consider that this was a dream- I had lost that level of faith in reality. I took it as it came because I had no energy to do anything else.

And that virtue would hopefully save my life. Because things stirred beneath the surface, and though I couldn’t see them, I could feel their movements through the soles of my feet (I hadn't bothered to wear anything under my shoes since I refused to die with wet socks.).

Nobody In Particular was never a fan of playing it fair.

And then I began to run. To where? I don’t know, but it would be better than here. Well, probably not, but fuck if I was going to wait to find out.