I don’t fall to my death: I jump.

There are these defying moments in everyone’s lives, when you have to make a decision within a couple of intense seconds, or even less. When you have to make a decision with your heart, because apparently that works faster than your head. Your brain is not quick enough to process things.

And in those milliseconds, your heart makes up your mind for you.
Your heart knows.

Well, it always has known, it’s just that now you know too.
Your stupid, stupid brain catches up.

I was sixteen years old the day my father died. My little brother found him. My mom was on stage, leading New York’s philharmonic orchestra with her cello. I was in the audience, waiting for my dad to come on stage and sing. He never did.

That was the day that my heart stopped believing in God.

Two years later, when I was eighteen, the girl I had given my heart to left me without a word of warning or explanation.

That was the day that my heart stopped beating.

It continued to beat, biologically, but it was dead in my chest.

And now, four years later, this is what my heart does: It tells me to jump.

I am standing on the edge of a cliff, in one of the most beautiful places in the world. But my heart is racing, my stomach is churning and cold sweat drenches the back of my neck. I look down. All I see are ten meters or more of solid, jagged-sharp rocks and then a glittering emerald pool of water at the bottom.

And also, she. She is at the bottom, in the water. In danger.

She.

The girl whose name I can’t mention even in my own private thoughts or it will destroy me, the girl who ripped out my heart and ruined my life.

That girl.

In the water.

Ten meters below the cliffs.

It happens before I have time to think. Before I have even time to blink, let alone think, I’ve jumped. Why? Because I’m an idiot, someone would reply. Well, I knew that already, no need for a death-jump to make me aware of the fact.

No.

The answer is an entirely new, different creature. A truth I never suspected for four years: but now I discover that it’s been true all along.

My God, I think, as my body plummets through the air in free-fall. How I have hated that girl. How many hours I have spent thinking bitter, horrible thoughts about her, hating her hating her hating her, cursing the day I met—

And then my feet hit the cold, freezing water. It’s hard and solid like cement, and pain shoots up my entire body as the breath catches in my throat.

And then there’s nothing.