There I stood, at the edge of the horizon,
ready to drop into the void that has long since consumed me,
complete and utter oblivion on my mind,
and looking toward the angry sky,
my eyes watch the last sunset I'll ever see.

Before I plunge, I breathe in untainted air for the first time since birth,
and I count the palpitations of my still beating heart,
the sky fades to black.

It all goes blank, like watching a tragedy unravel from behind a one-way mirror and being powerless to stop it,
confronting the familiar sensation of drowning,
except, this time it's for real
and there is no way to escape the burning of your barren lungs,
now my heart trembles in the depth of despair,
its final beat pounding in my ears like the echoes of a drum.

Rising from the waves, I swim unscathed
as if I'd been above the water all along,
and I wash upon the dusty shore,
unsure if I've met my tumultuous fate,
my phantom longing to soar,
but invisible chains bonded me, forbidding me from leaving the uncontrollable storm that was brewing.

It didn't take long to realize that this was the oblivion,
the nothingness that I thought would finally bring peace,
all of my reasons seemed as far away as the sun in the sky that I could no longer reach.

The world was still spinning,
maybe somewhere my presence long-forgotten,
my thoughts and my dreams evaporated to dust,
everything that I had once touched:
gone and never to be seen again.

My soul is broken on the ocean floor,
the shattered remains left to fly on fractured wings,
pieces of me sent to every person I love or have loved,
and I can only watch on the outside as they ask themselves what they could have done to save me;

Why didn't they save me?

And I look up to every mountain top,
every cloud passing by,
all in a similar cycle that I had never noticed before because I was so caught up in my own pessimism that I did not see the beauty all around me.

I did not see the hands extended in the air to hold me up after I had fallen,
I had not seen the silent pleas in their eyes
or the ghosts of my past haunting them the way they had haunted me.

Now the stone girl had cracked
and all that they couldn't discern was displayed,
leaving me nothing but an illusion to vanish into the shadows;

and for the first time,
tears swept through my entire being,
the realization that ending my life was forever
but you never think about that until after you've jumped;

that the limits to my own mortality became clear
in the millisecond before the sunset,
the last glimpse of light I ever saw before I raced through the tunnel to find it.

They say that light can vanquish darkness,
but they never tell you that sometimes the darkness needs more than embers,
sometimes it needs a sunset.

And if someday I were to live again,
I would never take them for granted.