Ten Seconds
by Xodiac
I stand upon the edge, looking down. It's a long drop. A quarter mile, I'm told. Quite a ways to fall.
I don't back away.
I raise my arm before me, and see not the gangly human arms I see in the mirror every day, belonging to a too-tall man with a too-long face and scraggly hair. I see a wing, ready to make my body soar.
To fly...
I am not high. I am not drunk. I am not insane. I have thought about this, long and hard. I read a book not long ago; they mention that once a body hits terminal velocity, it would seem like the earth is moving quickly towards it, rather than the other way around. Freefall.
What else is flight but that? A split second of pain, an unmeasurable instant of agony, is worth ten seconds of that kind of freedom, I think.
It's the only freedom I'm likely to get. I feel trapped, caged by my life like an exotic bird from the Amazon. A dead-end job, a dead-end family, a dead-end life. Nobody knows me, no matter how often I told them or how loud I shouted it out. My potential is unrealized. What it is potential for, I don't know, but surely I had some. Had, past tense.
Again I look over the edge. I can see clearly all the way down, make out the ripples on the river that winds its way through the canyon. It's beautiful, and I take a moment to admire the scene.
I click my beak, considering, and leap before I can think it over again. I spread my wings, and fly.
For ten seconds.
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I'm not prone to depression, but it does hit every now and then. This time, obviously, it was worse than most. I really was feeling somewhat suicidal when I wrote this, and I thought at the time jumping would be probably the best way to go. Writing this helped get it out of my system, and it's turned into one of my favorite stories. Very, very short, of course, but it's fine for such a moody piece.
Interestingly, I did the calculations to see how far someone would fall in ten seconds. Turns out to be about half a kilometer. And yes, there are cliffs on earth with that long a vertical drop.