I'm Not Suicidal, Except When I'm Really Happy

Here is an excerpt from the book I'm writing.  Hopefully sharing this will put a little more fire under my ass!

Sometimes I imagine myself at the edge of that building - arms outstretched.  I have been there.  I have stood before, looking out at the land spreading before me, opening like a flower or a bee hive - above it all is the buzz of everyone trying, in a million languages, to say something.  

There I am listening to the collective music, pulling from the wind specific aromas, threads from the woven melange that rides the air.  Here is the ocean and then the Hudson, a muddied cousin to our beloved Atlantic, swishing around, the inspiration for many great bridges.  I stand taller, breathe more deeply.  There is a loaf of Polish bread sitting on a counter top, baked this morning.  There is the smell of plastic and waste - diapers set out the previous evening, not yet collected by the trash man.  Here is a passing grandfather, coat impregnated with the aroma of mothballs and basement hiding places.  It takes me away for a moment.

 I smell traffic fumes, the mushroomy wash of false fruit blossoms, the city's attempt at decoration without the mess of arboreal ovaries.  I have been in this place, listening, smelling, looking and feeling separate from it all.  The seduction of an easy step, the dizzying pull to finally, finally become part of this world.  Perhaps I would not die, but simply atomize into it all, float with the wind until it was time to stop and rain on a swampy patch along a river.  I have been close to convincing myself of these things.  But it's always a flirtation.  Nothing more serious.  When Luna told me her mother jumped from the roof of this building, I felt every cell in my body turn itself inside out.  My own coquetry with life became childish.  My heart ached and I reached out to my friend.  I wanted to hold her, but it was not just to offer comfort, I wanted to remind my body of the importance of connection.  Why haven't I jumped before?  This is why:  so that I might sit closer to another human, feel myself in her.  Opening myself to real connection is another way of leaping, the unbearably beautiful pain of looking at someone and recognizing myself.