Nelson walked out onto the roof and made to hold my hand. I waved him off, warning him that I'd jump if he came closer, yet he kept coming. He sat beside me on the roof's edge and looked me in the eyes as he spoke.

"Suicide is not a cowards way out", he said.

-Death scares everyone, and the level of severe intractable daily emotional pain that it takes to make someone want to kill themselves in the first place is so constant and horrendous that it actually supercedes the fear of death.-

I began thinking, 'was he advising me to do it?' or 'was he trying to trying to dissuade me in his own weird way?'. When I stopped to think about it, Nelson never really talked. He was always the silent one in the group. And yet here he was, seventy stories up and over a ledge preaching to me.

-I think that selfish cowards are those who want their loved ones to stick around in spite of this daily, hideous, intractable pain that makes life intolerable. It is like keeping someone who is half dead on life support because you will miss them when they are gone, even though their body is eating itself from the inside out and they are shitting in a bag. That is cowardly and selfish.-

I couldn't believe what was I hearing. I was in an internal argument with myself.

-Had he climbed all the way up here to tell me all this? Why not stay down there and tell my story later?-

I started getting angry, he was making it harder for me, wasting my time, yet on he went. I didn't even understand what he was preaching, it all sounded sad, philosophical and stuff. Required a bit too much thinking. That was not my forte. Man was I fed up?

-The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of maybe hopelessness or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square, and surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. On the other hand however, the person in whom pain's invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill himself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.-

-Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows, their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view, the variable here is the other terror, being the fire's flames.-

-When the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It becomes the easier way to go after accepting the fact that both roads lead to one destination.-

-You can't desire the fall, neither can you embrace the terror of the flames, and yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!", can understand the jump, not really, they'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.-

He looked up at me and smiled. He looked so happy, like he'd just delivered a proper presentation and got an A.

"Say hi to the baby for me"

Then he jumped.