Content Warning:
This piece includes references to mental health challenges such as suicidal thoughts, experiences of discrimination, and emotionally intense language. As this year’s theme explores transitions, some submissions engage deeply with personal and vulnerable experiences. Please take care while reading, and feel free to pause or step away if needed.
The only choice I had left. Just a few centimeters between me and the brief trip to nothing. A faint pink joined the softening blue horizon, reminding me that I was running out of time. I had already assured one cheerful morning jogger that I was fine, that I was simply an ambitious photographer capturing a death-defying view of the sunrise above the city’s skyline. I felt guilty lying to her, knowing that defying death hadn’t crossed my mind in months. My legs balanced somewhere between asleep and numb, courtesy of the crisp 5:34AM air and the hours I had spent in this unmoving position, crouched on the tiny ledge with one hand clutching the railing so hard my white knuckles shook. The railing that represented so much more than its thin, welded frame, a barrier separating the dead and the living. Walking along the bridge’s cracked and weathered sidewalk, I had felt a sense of connection to the thousands driving, biking, and running the bridge’s length each day, but now I felt more alone than I knew possible, accompanied only by my mind, neither a cheerful nor a supportive companion. Although it had been only a matter of months, this mind was the only one I knew anymore. The big black dog stood squarely between me and my memories, just in case I thought I might try to remember the feelings of hope and possibility I used to take for granted. My brain, having gleefully worked the overtime shift for as long as I can remember, barking out anxious thoughts with an intensity that it couldn’t seem to apply to anything else, took this chance to finally go silent, sensing that thoughts of the future were now moot. The feeling of peace settling over me is something difficult to explain. I’m no longer scared of my mind, of the 257 foot drop I had carefully researched in the preceding weeks, of being gone. I’m not searching for reasons to stay. My brain is confident that these reasons, much like any paths forward beyond suicide are no longer a reality. Except for one. One reason. The reason keeping me rooted here, when my brain has managed to block out even the thousands of years of evolutionary survival impulses that should be keeping me far, far away from this ledge.