"How long will it take, if I jump from here?" I looked down at the serene and bottomless view from the expensive rooftop of the hospital I was currently admitted in.
The wind, which was cold and chilly, grazed against my dry, unnourished skin, reminding me of how far up I had climbed while straining my tired body.
"Perhaps the same time it took for you to pass out after you did that." The girl standing beside me pointed towards my wrist with the burning cigarette in her mouth.
If we're talking about introductions, then there's not much to mention.
I am but a fading moth, burnt after trying to chase the youthful fire like the story you get to hear from every other nonchalant and depressed social butterfly.
And accompanying me was a 'friend', if that is the correct term people use these days, whom I met on the bed beside mine, while I was imprisoned in this healthcare jail the Government and its people deem necessary to provide when a person wilfully chooses to move on to the next stage of their miserable tangible lives.
"How did you even cut so deep? Sheesh, girl, I would never have the courage to even try that." She smoked by puffing on her death sentence, as she exasperatedly complimented my artistic skills.
No idea why, but she seemed to be hallucinating that I was a woman.
"What can I say? It's not my first time." I slowly leaned back against the railing, one of my feet dangling over the edge.
"Hah… And I heard people mention that it was maturity that came with experience." She exhaled the pungent gas which passively diffused through the air and entered my sensitive nostrils.
"Don't blow it on my face." I reprimanded her for shortening my non-existent vitality.
"Hahaha." She joyfully laughed as she puffed like an addict again, blowing another round directly on my face.
I would have probably held her face and screamed her name, but my dizzy brain didn't quite remember what her forgettable identity was.
"I'm serious, stop it-"
"Say", she cut me off, "I'm curious. What is the reason that you decided to call it quits?"
"Sigh…" Her question sort of annoyed me.
It wasn't that I was excessively sentimental or the kind that didn't have it in them to share their own problems, but the situation was uncannily funny to me since all I saw behind me, in the years that I had trodden through, was a meaningless spiral of ever nothingness.
"Nothing really. I just got bored." I answered her truthfully.
"Oh, so your husband left you too?" She chuckled as she flicked the cigarette butt towards the busy city below.
"No. Can I say no?" I guess I wasn't that truthful.
She chuckled at my mellow joke.
Our pointless banter could have probably been an iconic start to a real friendship, but sadly, I had no intentions of dilly dallying.
So I resolved myself for my next course of action but she interrupted my train of thoughts again.
"Won't your children be sad, if you go?"
She asked me the question every doting mother has at least once thought about while they wasted their free lives, sorry, I mean motherhoods, as captive prisoners of undeserving men who have brainwashed them into believing that paternity was equivalent to Godhood and every ex-husband, the breadwinner and widowmaker, lawfully supreme.
I'm not anti-family. I'm just tired of boys pretending to be men who know it all.
Yes, you're right. My girlfriend dumped me through text.
"Childfree. Did IVF. Failed thrice." I swear making up these answers on the go made my belly tingle a little.
I prefer the term childfree since childless is too backwards and has a conservative origin. It has definitely no relation to my insecurities or trauma stemming from a failed 3 year old relationship.
"Ah…" She shook her head, accurately displaying sympathy. "What was it? Tumour?"
"Tumour."
At least God had plans for me, and for some divine reason, that grand plan involved putting two stony cysts in my ex-girlfriend's body which I couldn't use.
"Shame. With how intelligent you are, you'd have been a great mother." She patched the wound she created in her own way.
"You don't really have to butter me." I rolled my eyes.
"Butter butter butter." She shouted at the night sky.
The gloominess in the atmosphere notched down a little as she vibrantly chucked the misogynistic icy air to hot submission.
"Hah…I guess some people never grow up." I smiled a bit unwittingly.
"Say Ana", she called my name.
That's right. My name is Ana. Surprise surprise. Anna Viktor Kramling.
Don't ask. My mother was an alcoholic.
"Do you know what Reina means?" She uttered an inferior proper noun after paying due tribute to mine.
"Does it mean pain and suffering while being stuck on a rooftop with a monkey?"
Hey, I'm not a thesaurus or a dictionary.
"Hey, that's mean." She pretentiously puffed up her cheeks, filling them up with air like an energetic child crying for a toy inside the supermarket.
Yeah, that's another reason I'm childfree and why I never adopted or explored the option of single parenting.
"I'm sorry. My mood is kind of itchy right now."
What does an itchy mood even mean, though?
"Hehe." But I guess my excuse worked since she returned to her playful demeanour as she answered her own question. "Reina means Queen in spanish."
"Huh...Well Anna means being gracious and favoured by God." I don't know why I felt the need to say that.
"Hehe, well Ana is a great name." She smiled.
I know it is.
"But, Ana." She held the railing beside me. "Being favoured by God is quite a conundrum."
"Yeah, tell me about it." I positioned myself for the jump.
The talk with my shrink is going great and all, but I really don't want to back down now. I feel like I'll never have the courage to do this again if I shy away from this moment.
With my shoeless feet firmly planted on the ledge, my toes gripping the sharpness of the corner of the concrete roof, and my hands on the railing acting as levers to push myself forward in the near future, I looked down again, down towards freedom.
"Like for example, in your afterlife, there could be a tyrannical and dangerous Empress ruling an extremely powerful military empire armed to the teeth with mythical beasts and magical cavalry, and you could be asked to fight her." My sole partner kept blabbering nonsensical fiction while I embraced myself for finality.
I guess the anaesthetic drugs the nurses shoved down her throat have started working.
"Better late than never." I was finally ready.
"And she could possibly feel threatened by you so she might try to remove you-"
"Yeah well if that happens, I'll just dominate her first." I turned to her and smiled.
It felt odd to speak before your partner ended their sentence but oddly satisfying too. Anyway, I know that I'm stretching this unnecessarily and I could just end things easily but I really don't want a lecture on how to end my own life.
"Really?" She smiled radiantly.
"Really." I let our smiles unify and get etched into the temporary sands of time.
"Then Ana, I leave the Raven Empire's fate in your hands." She beamed as she spoke like a lunatic.
"Sure, girl. In the next life then." I let go and jumped straight ahead.
"Also, you'll be teleported to an academy full of such girls…" Unheard words faded into the night city.