Suicide is just a moment. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you & the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, & you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife & press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window & you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. & most of the time, you look at the height & you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school & they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? & the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, & you look at your dog & wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. & you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, & the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same. The day was hers to choose, & perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down & saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth & chose instead a single moment in the air.