[bridges]

So stuff is still great, for the most part. Well, life is great, it's just that my head turns inside out sometimes. So stuff is great and my head is mostly okay.

A dude just jumped off the bridge a little while ago -- I'm assuming it was a dude, anyway. The person, the jumper, I suppose -- hit the water instead of the concrete. There was much flurry and CPR and then nothing. We don't know if the person lived or not. We just know that they jumped.

People in my office were surprisingly off-the-cuff about the whole thing -- comments ranged from "I hope the rent is cheap here" to nervous laughter... the other side was a concern for media overload, and did we need to leave to escape the onslaught of attention -- and then there was one, "yeah, I've never seen it happen on a nice day like this though." A nice day like this. A nice day like this where the sun's out and I'm struggling with the intricacies of interpersonal relations at my office, and assessing the threads of my job performance as they relate to... well, whatever -- and in those moments, even the ones where I stopped doing that and went to the kitchen to heat lunch and maybe brush my hair or send a funny email -- someone else had lost hope. All of it. So much so that they jumped from the Aurora bridge, sky blue sky, more sunshine than you could shake a stick at, with the hint of fall starting to sneak underneath like the promise of a scarf as you stand in the sun in your t-shirt.

"Hopeless." "Jump." Two little, short words. Strung together to form a tragedy, or an attempted tragedy, I suppose an assumed tragedy in any case.

I'm drawn back to that book, The Undertaking -- there's lines in it, something and something about poets and funerals. I went from golden cellophane to torn tissue paper, easily poked at, soft skin underneath. The melancholy in place of a reeling, raging weekend. Blank stares winning out over the words starting to form in my head, words I've been writing for days, trying to figure out how to give these snapshots of Texas, and trying to pour the rest of myself into my notebooks. Black ink. Not hopeless. No jump.

I wrote it in pen on my message pad when one of the guys called. "jumper" in lowercase, with a box around it. Like it meant something, like writing it did something. My to-do list is just a pile of words, the impending avalanche of laundry and agenda preparation for the morning suddenly seem like so much... less. So much smaller. I'm not trying to melodramatic or anything, and I'm going to do my job and wash the mud off my skirt and all that -- I guess I just don't understand how no one else is left reeling, even if it's only just a little bit of reeling. I want to walk over to the spot where the police were and just stand there, and take it in. To see if -- I don't know what. Maybe just to give that moment some homage and respect, I mean -- here I am in my open-collaboration cube farm, we all are -- and someone hit the end of their rope today. Literally. Someone who might have a family, or even just a cat, or a girlfriend or a dinner date tonight that will wonder why they got stood up.

It feels like I'm the only person who even paid it much attention. It just doesn't make much sense to go back to pushing paper right now, but seeing as I'm rented for these hours every weekday at a respectable rate, I sort of have to.