I was leaning out of the window at the Benjamin Franklin hotel in Philadelphia smoking a cigarette in a no smoking room when I looked down. I was fourteen floors up, and I had a clean shot at the exhaust fans on the roof below. I had that crazy thought that someone might come up behind me and tip me out of the window, then I had the even crazier thought that it would feel so good to just fly for a minute.
Just to fly. That exhilarating moment when all of the cares and concerns in my day-to-day life would become insignificant. That moment, right before the inevitable regrets, when peace and contentment would be mine.
I imagined my broken body in the crime scene death pose, like a flower arrangement gone awry. I could let go. Have my freedom. I probably wouldn't even hit the ground. I would leave my body right before and just the flesh and bones of me would be broken.
Down on the street, miniature people were on their way home from work. Couples meandered hand in hand. Pretty, well dressed women with brief cases and cell phones walked as if they were late for very important meetings. Other lives were playing out all around me as I contemplated my mortality.
Why is everyone so worried about dying? Once you're dead, there's nothing else to worry about. No bills to pay, no painful, unanswered questions to haunt me, no wondering why I get so tangled up some times with the simplest things, like "who am I really?" and "what do I want from this life?"
No echo's of the little girl I used to know who cried so many nights wondering what she had done wrong to make life hurt so much.
I have to shut the window. The temptation is too great. I want to be a keepsake. A pressed rose pedal in a journal full of poetry, written secretly by the faded woman standing down there on the corner, waiting for the bus.