My hands trembled with excitement. I waited outside her apartment building three blocks away from Times Square. I was surprising her for the first time since she’d moved away.
I had more than just the simple surprise of my presence. The “Times,” offered me an assistant editor position, which meant we would no longer be thousands of miles away from each other.
Here’s the thing, I am twenty-nine years old and I have never been married or had any children. Although, I didn’t want to end up like my brother, who had six children before he turned twenty-seven, I also didn’t want to become the lonely man who never had the satisfaction of marriage or any proud moments as a father.
I was always careful when it came to women. I learned from my older brother. He told me, “I love all of my children greatly, but if I could go back to my early twenties again, I’d do it differently.”
That stuck with me for all of my teenage years. In my life, if I had ever met The One, I probably looked away in efforts to live out my youth like my brother said. I was always careful and took things very slow when it came to relationships of the opposite sex. I didn’t want to have any regrets when I finally settled down.
Now, I am almost thirty and I have no Christmas cards with my family pictures in it. I have no wedding band around my finger signifying that I’m capable of being committed to something. I have no soccer games to go to on Saturday mornings, but there is one thing I do have and that is my Annie.
After two years of romantic untypical dates and candlelit dinners, Annie had to move away to chase her dreams of becoming a dancer. She finally made it in one of the big showings that played weekly in New York. She was like that. She wasn’t impulsive, but when it came to doing what she wanted to do, she just did it. No matter what stepped in her way, if she wanted something bad enough she would go after it.
I could only aspire to do something as audacious as moving away from everything I’d ever known, to a strange place, for the sake of my dreams.
Finally, someone came out of the doorway so I could get inside her apartment. It seemed like the walls of the hallway were breathing heavily in unison with my anticipation. I walked into the elevator and pressed the seventh floor button.
I was left alone with my thoughts of how she would react to seeing me for the first time in months. Every beep from the elevator ascending floors became a slideshow of changing images. The excitement and shock shown on her face with every picture in my head only made matters worse to the precipitating pores in my skin.
With love to give that would leave her breathless, I watched the elevator doors open. In my hands were her favorite chocolates and a small bouquet of flowers. In my eyes were memories of the times we spent laughing, crying, loving, and smiling together. In my heart was space for nothing, because Annie crowded the room from wall to wall. In my pocket was a symbol of commitment that I had been waiting to give her.
I knocked on the door. I felt the pounding of my own beating heart. I heard her footsteps toward the door. In my mind, a part of me wanted her not to be there. Nervous couldn’t justify the way I felt as she twisted the door knob and opened the door.
The door cracked open further and further. When she came into my view, she was looking back like she just finished a conversation with someone. Then she looked in my eyes and swallowed back air into her lungs rapidly, creating a sound that I’ll never forget. It almost seemed like it wasn’t a good thing. It was like fear was the reason her surprised face shuddered.
“Alex, what are you doing here?”
I smiled. I wanted to kiss her all over and make my way into her bed. When I noticed she wasn’t alone. The movement from the corner of my eye answered questions I didn’t even ask, like why was she still in pajamas at five o’clock in the afternoon? Her hair was everywhere screaming infidelities.
Something about the stale, dead air brought to my attention how frantic her body seemed. She was shaking, but not in the way I had been. She was sweating, but not like I was in the hallway. She was nervous, but not like the way I was when she opened the door.
The silence continued and I finally saw the strange person in the room with us. I wanted anger to be the emotion that leaped out on the table of our relationship, but there was nothing.
I felt the air conditioning freeze over my sweat glands, leaving me cold and alone. I dropped her gifts and turned around with nothing to say. I heard her drop to her knees like she was supposed to be the one crying.
As I walked away, I thought about myself. I am almost thirty and I still don’t have a family yet. Time is running out for me, I thought. There won’t be enough time for me to start over with someone else.
I wanted to go someplace where the sun would warm my cold extremities. Some place where the wind would leave a sobering breeze for me to let go of every memory I had of her. I wanted a place where every photograph of her seen through my mind’s eye would die. Somewhere I could clear my head and start to separate our relationship to my life without her.
I walked up the steps to the top of apartment building and started a slight grin because I had found the exact place I was looking for. My body still seemed as depressed as when I saw the guy in her bedroom, laying around like he owned the place.
Shaking my thoughts of her, I silenced my mind for a moment. I allowed my eyes to be the only one of the five senses to tell me where exactly I was. I thought about how all senses only had one common objective of telling me where exactly I was located. My mind was telling me why I was there, but I tried to drown out any information pertaining to the last ten minutes of my life.
I found the view amazing. I had the Hudson River to my left and the galore of tall buildings on my right. The mixture of the sun’s warmth and the river’s breeze would suffice my desires for the time being.
I didn’t want to let one tear drop fall because that would be wasting an emotion I could keep for someone else. If there would ever be someone else. I didn’t want to waste my time with thinking about her anymore.
“Excuse me, sir.”
I turned around hoping it wasn’t Annie who followed me.
“I made reservations to die right here and you are directly in my way.”
Stunned, but not completely blown away with what she said, I responded, “Wait a second, do you even know what you just said to me?”
“Oh go ahead, say something a text book could have told me. Tell me something just like the rest of them. Tell me it’s not right. Tell me to choose life. Go ahead! Really…Give it your best shot.”
“Excuse me miss, I think you’ve got me confused with someone else. I’m not here to stop you and tell you to choose life.”
“Well, would you please excuse me? I think I want to die right over there.”
Something inside me wanted to stay in front of her and call for help. Something about this beautiful girl made me think twice about why she would want to die.
I tried, but it didn’t come out smoothly, “Things aren’t as bad or good as they seem in life. But there is something about life that you should know. Every day you can decide how good or bad things really are. You always have that choice.”
“Oh how heart-felt. I'm glad I have that choice. Now, excuse me because I don’t care about hearing your cliché motivations of why I shouldn’t jump.”
I don’t know why I said it, but I thought I’d get it off my chest, “I just flew thousands of miles to see my girlfriend. I came here to tell her I got a job here in New York. I mean, it would change everything. We would be living in the same state again. I wanted to ask her to marry me.”
I showed her the ring and waited to see if she was still listening or even if she really cared.
The response time I gave her fell silent and I continued, “I wrote letters and I should have known from her lack of ability to reply. I should have never come here to surprise her. She already had someone else. But seeing it in person was the worst way possible for our relationship to end. Now, I am almost thirty and I haven’t started a family yet…So you’re here and I don’t have the slightest clue why you would want to jump. But, I do know this. If you jump right now I promise I’d be left here wondering what I could have done differently to keep you here. I would rather give you a choice. Instead of dying, will you live with me?”
A fell swoop of silence pushed us together. The proximity of her body brought the closeness of our pain together. With one stare into her suicidal eyes, I tripped into in a joyous wonder.
Our waists touched and her hand slowly made its way down my arm to my palms. In an effort to keep her touching me, I didn't move.
My heart beat slowly and with every drop of blood it pumped into my body, I’d give it all to her and not for the sake of her to live without jumping. I’d give it all to her so she’d jumped into me.
My heart beat slowly and with every drop of blood it pumped into my body, I’d give it all to her and not for the sake of her to live without jumping. I’d give it all to her so she’d jumped into me.
She spoke softly, “Are you crazy? You don’t even know me.”
“Yes I know and I’d like to change that too.”
She was left silent again as she didn’t know how to respond with my way of words. I gave her a response that only proved to have truth beneath every line.
Through my form of expression she could taste my sincerity, “I could say all of these things to convince you to stay, like how life has all of these moments where self conclusion becomes the easiest way to get out. Even though we flirt with self destruction, we’re not supposed to act on the thoughts of ending our life. But, you already heard that before. You’ve probably told yourself many times in an attempt to convince yourself. Well, my offer still stands for you to live with me. I won’t stop you either way.”
Through my form of expression she could taste my sincerity, “I could say all of these things to convince you to stay, like how life has all of these moments where self conclusion becomes the easiest way to get out. Even though we flirt with self destruction, we’re not supposed to act on the thoughts of ending our life. But, you already heard that before. You’ve probably told yourself many times in an attempt to convince yourself. Well, my offer still stands for you to live with me. I won’t stop you either way.”
I stepped away from her like the newly created space would give her more confidence in her decision. Her eyes looked up at mine. Even with her tangled, broken down hair she was as beautiful as the violet clouds on the sunset over the Hudson.
She shuffled her feet and whispered loud enough for me to hear, “Okay. I’ll give you one chance to make your offer more appealing than my attempt at flight. I swear to God, if you hurt me I will jump right off of this building and you won’t even see it coming. I don’t have much left to lose from my heart so know that I am on the edge of the earth and I’m not begging for someone to give me a reason to come down. This isn’t some cry out for help or attention. I wanted to die because living has become full of this self loathing sympathy for me. My insides are filled to the top with emptiness. I had no plan of anyone saving me here before I met you. Just know that I was hoping to see no one up here when I opened the door. If you hurt me you can count on me leaving this human race, I promise.”
“I know exactly what you're going through. Just three minutes before you came up here I was going to jump too.”Inspired by "The Spill Canvas."
