The wind up here is incredibly strong, more so than I imagined it would be. Only someone in my state of mind should venture off the dirt road and near to the ledge on which I am standing, teetering a bit, but presently resolute in my place on this ball of dust we call Earth.

I’ve thought through all the reasons, for and against. Eventually, a man sees the futility in arguing with himself, locked in a contest for which there are no real winners, one for which nobody truly cares about the outcome. It’s not as if one facet of me will come out the victor, claiming a supremacy of ideas and a certainty that everything will be alright from here on out. No side of me will gain anything by winning his debate, except a totality so thorough that nothing familiar will survive, afterwards.

The time for verbal jousting is over. Standing at the edge of what was once the bedrock of an ancient ocean floor, thrust through the eons up to a towering height, far above the greatest edifices of mortal men, I peer down and take in the vast scene below me. I can clearly make out a river winding like a black slender snake through the rocks in the gorge, even by moonlight. The night-time sun is at its fullest brightness; I chose this night especially for this reason. No blind leap into the unknown darkness for me; that will come soon enough. I want to take in every detail.

I’ve even thought about how long the journey will take. Accounting for wind shear and my general shape, it should take about twelve seconds to reach the bottom, barring something miraculous. I don’t know if this will be the longest or the shortest twelve seconds of my life.

I look down. Should I say something on the way down? It would fall on deaf ears. No one will mark whether I yell “Geronimo” or “Remember the Alamo.” Who really recalls the Alamo, anyway, outside of Texas? No, I think a silent trip is the best. I will see what I will see and it will be over. One can take this sort of trip only once.

I gaze up at the moon, and all sorts of questions start to pop up in my mind. That’s how my mind works. I don’t set about to unravel the deep mysteries or longing queries of humanity. They simply pop up like soda bubbles with little pre-planning. Why does this moon appear so big to my eyes but so small when I take a picture of it? Did we honestly go up there or have we all been victims to the greatest hoax in the history of mankind? If that pale sphere is strong enough to move the vast oceans about, can it in some strange way keep me from hitting the rocky floor and splitting into smaller, more gruesome versions of myself? Now that would be marvelous.

Departure time has arrived. Air traffic control has given the green light, and we are cleared for takeoff. The fat lady has sung and it is time to go home. I can think of a few more metaphors, but I am only delaying the unavoidable.

Is this inevitable? Who decided this was inescapable? Did I lose that debate? No, there is no need to go through the whole thing again. This is not about inevitability. Nothing so final is ever certain at any given time. The future twists and turns at every moment from a thousand butterfly wing decisions rippling like currents with growing or diminishing force, depending on whether you covered your mouth when you sneezed, or whether some girl twenty miles away ran a stop sign. You can go mad thinking about it. All you can do is decide what you are going to do at each moment and hope nothing interferes. I suppose sometimes you hope something will, in fact, interfere; but not today.

I step out. At the last instant I spread my arms out and pitch forward, a windswept crucifixion in midair, a bird of stone with neither feather nor flight, a flesh and blood tree uprooted from the razor edge of the flat earth we always suspected.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to be responding to external stimuli in an almost impossible time frame? Or one which seems to take days to unfold when you know you were only asleep for an hour or two? I have always surmised that our perception of time is a fluid thing. I imagine children experience time much more slowly than adults, which is why the ten-minute drive to get groceries flies by when I’m behind the wheel now, but felt like half an hour when I was a child in the backseat back then. If I was ever unsure of my ideas about time, certainty has come crashing in a second after I began my descent. Something about knowing this is my final twelve seconds has caused my brain to jump into dream-fast mode.

The first wave of thought that hits me is regret. Not about what I just did, but a hundred different stupid things that have plagued me from childhood on up through recent years. Like the time I told one girl, who was so excited she had been appointed to the F.A.T. council at school, that she was perfect for the job since she was, you must understand, quite large herself. Yes, those words came out of my mouth before I realized she was talking about the Food Advisory Team and no such correlation had entered her mind until I uttered that sentence. Her face fell, and as I can recall she never spoke to me again for the rest of our high school careers.

Disappointments flashed through, recollected and experienced in a second: a girl who once convinced me to do my first suicide turn into traffic, then later said I should have been braver and asked her out; she would have said yes. I remember an application for high school Hall of Fame recognition that I turned in empty, so sure I would be a shoo-in I completely forgot to fill it out. Another time I backed out of serving in the military mere days before I was to take the oath. Where would I be now had I honored my commitments?

All of it fades and is supplanted by the recollections of all the brass rings I ever reached out and grasped, honors and accolades, scholarships, impossible feats. All amounts to a hill of beans now. It was just glittery trinkets, long since tarnished and dulled. My mind brings them out for one more dog and pony show, so I can remember I was once great among men.

Then a wave of sorrow crashes over me. This is what prompted this journey in the first place. Love lost, friendships lost, missed opportunities, things I should have been better at, time I wasted in vain pursuits. It does raise the question for the thousandth time: why don’t I just resolve to do better from here on out? Why not call a do-over and try to do right after today and the next day? Deep inside, though, I know life has no do-overs, and the ghosts and demons I summoned in moments of weakness will follow me all my days.

My body twists about and I notice the moon so silvery bright, watching me, in turn, grow smaller against the floor of the gorge that must surely be a breath away now. Now an odd thing occurs both to that heavenly body and to me. The shining orb looks bigger than it was when I viewed it from the top of the cliff. In fact, it is expanding even as I continue to fall, taking up more and more of the sky. I notice canyons and valleys and trenches growing clearer as its vastness envelops the clouds and the stars. I can actually feel its light on my body like a tractor beam. Inwardly, I sense the rays of moonlight tugging at my very soul, trying to separate it from this mortal flesh which continues to hurtle toward the jagged rocks below.

Why haven’t I hit the bottom? I wonder this a moment before the thunderous impact of my body against the stony outcroppings lining the bank of the river. I often hear people say they are being pulled in so many directions, or that they don’t know if they are coming or going. Those expressions turn out to be weak approximations of the real thing. For an instant I perceive with horror my head, my right and left ribs, my arms and legs, explode in different trajectories. There is no time for pain, just a split-second of feeling like a human supernova and then…

Then. Impossibly, a “then” proceeds.

I still see the moon. Its beams now course through me and fill me with their light and energy. They pull at me, although I can’t determine which part of me since I am still quite sure I am currently splattered all over a good portion of stone floor. I float upwards as the lunar light pulls me into its embrace, and what took one dozen seconds to cover now takes several minutes as I rise higher and higher, until I can discern the ledge from which I have recently plunged.

Now this mysterious force lifts me over the edge, and I am helpless in its grasp, drifting away from the edge and over the cold hard ground, toward the little tent I have been spending the last couple of nights in. I am like a blown bubble, floating gently in through the front opening. I land softly on my bag, still warm from when I last lay in it. Warmth envelopes me, fills me, and delight seeps into my soul as I realize I still possess eyes. I perceive that they are shut and all is dark. I open them. I am alive, and will be ever more so, afterwards.