I Wanted the Insanity to Stop.
I wanted to die.
I was beyond drunk but I didn’t think, Maybe I can fly! Nor did I want to show Larry that I was really leaving him. Sure, my judgment was completely skewed by my alcoholic thinking, but it wasn’t the alcohol that caused me to jump.
I’d just been beaten to a pulp by my boyfriend and I quite rationally believed: Now I have nothing.
The thought, when it finally took hold, clarified the loneliness that had been brewing and stewing inside of me forever. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could not handle anything beyond this moment. I’d reached the end.
I did not want to be a part of this people-filled world where I didn’t fit. I wanted the insanity to stop, the stupidity to stop, the pain to stop. I just wanted to be done.
But as I flew through the night sky, for the milliseconds that I was allowed to fly, as the pitch-black silent night enveloped me and I plummeted to the ground below, I had only one coherent, uncomplicated thought.
The Thought was: “Uh-oh.”
Translation: This wasn’t smart.
Since I catapulted through the window as though I were an Olympic diver, I fell head-first.
As I fell, my head collided with a staircase railing that emerged from the apartment below ours. My head bounced off the railing, flipping my whole body onto the ground below.
I was thrown onto my back with a brutal thud. It knocked the wind – but not the life – out of me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that railing probably saved my life. The staircase that I didn’t hit, and the sidewalk below that staircase, were both solid concrete. My head hit a sliver of wood instead, which then propelled me into the much softer, grassy backyard. I’d fallen fast and far and somehow completely avoided hitting anything fatal.
Since it was the middle of the night, I saw nothing. I heard nothing. Larry was nowhere. Our backyard was strategically placed so that we had to walk a block and a half around the slum building to get to the yard – so I’d never been in our backyard before.
But I knew where I was. I knew what had happened. I just couldn’t move. At all.
And I was completely, utterly alone.
Also, I was 100% alive – which was not what I’d wanted at all. I’d finally given suicide a real shot – no more aimlessly whacking at my wrists with a dull razor blade in a drunken stupor. I’d really, really tried to die.
But there I was, not dead on the ground, staring at the sky, watching the stars still sparkling up there as they’d always done.
I lay silently in the grass, unable to move.
After I hit the ground I knew, the way that only the innermost core of one’s being can know, that I must have some reason for being on this planet.
I just didn’t know the reason. And there was only one way to find out.
With all the energy I could muster, I screamed at the sky: “What do you want from me now, God?!”
The world was quiet, and the stars continued to sparkle. I did not hear the voice of God. I didn’t hear a train passing or even a barking dog in the distance. There was no sound.
So I yelled again: “What do you want from me now?!!”
Still, I did not receive a reply.
I lay motionless in the dark, and waited.