Ex Nihilo

• we could build a mansion

〨

          Seven months ago, I jumped off my roof.

Fell for eighteen years before I hit the driveway like a bag of second-hand soul. Mom wasn't home, Dad was at work and no one saw me fly.

I was Jonathan Briley, beautiful Falling Man and it was heartbreaking, I swear.

I think I laid there for almost an hour, face melting into the concrete like toxic waste and ice cream. I wanted to be ice cream.

Then Will walked by and spotted me, crying out my pesky heart from a crack in the back of my skull.

I sometimes remember the look on his face when he ran up and caught me smiling. I want to paint it someday. Make him untitled (William skull) or something.

"What the...
Day? Day?!
Shit. Oh, man. Fuck.
Oh, God! You're bleeding!
There's so mu―...oh, FUCK!
Day?! Day?!
Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God..."

"Hm?"

Words get lost all the time. And by then I had already sent mine away.

I was drifting, blinking through a red kaleidoscope as the horizon darkened around me, a pretty mess of one nasty picture.

I dreamed of sirens and tunnels of light that evening and kept dreaming for what felt like death before I woke up from the coma a week later. IVs in my veins and yellow wallpapered ceiling, I only remember an empty hospital room and feeling like the worst fucking joke in the world.

The sun is still,
wind; asleep,
and the trees are never paying attention.
There's a foreign muscle hammering its way into my inner ear,
tossing the scene around me out to the periphery of alignment.
I'm right on the edge, looking down,
and the only thing I can excavate from this
dead pounding rock hiding beneath my ribs is a
sigh, a mumbled sum of the rot of my life;
"Huh."