The night before I’d fallen in my sleep. That empty fall with no end and the lurch awake leaving your stomach somewhere else. Everyone has that dream, that and teeth falling out. I’d had both more times than I could remember, but I’d never before had trouble falling back to sleep.

Couldn’t shake the feeling like there was further to fall, a pit I’d trip to as I got up trying not to wake her. On toes and arched feet I crept for the door, avoiding creaky floorboards and deep dark holes. She made noise, but it was closer to a sigh than words. She slept.

Shadows fell across the house still unfamiliar and there was comfort when lightbulb snap chased the black shapes away. The feeling lingered. It was early morning, or late night depending how you figured it. The sun was non committal, it might rise, it might not. I sat for a time in an empty world just listening.

Normally I’d return to her, steal her warmth and wrap myself tight, but today was the first day back. Efforts were needed, dedication and perspiration, so I found myself on campus early with time to waste and the taste of too little sleep on my tongue. I headed for the towers. I’d spent the previous year living six floors up, sentiment and nostalgia led me back. Pretty they weren’t, dirty great columns of grey brick that dominated the landscape as fourteen stories built atop a hill will, but they were home. At least they had been for a time. Monuments, testaments to something, reaching like fists to scrape the underside of the brewing storm overhead. One thousand one hundred and forty six lives stacked eye to sky and I had been one of them.

With no one around, for it was far too early, I indulged in a little ritual. Toes and nose I stood against the cold wall so I could smell the mix of rainwater and concrete between the layers of brick. Then I looked straight up, the full fourteen floors, up beyond the roof to the low dark rumbling rain clouds. Pressed like that perspective shifts, the mind plays tricks. Soon enough I wasn’t looking up to the sky, but down to a river of running slate coloured water cloying and thick. Despite myself, and my feet firmly planted, it felt like I was falling. That little wave of excitement and fear, the one we crave and ride rollacoasters for, made its way swirling, radiating from my stomach outward. Every time previous, drunk, stoned or indifferent, I greeted the feeling giddy and giggling, but not that morning. I figured it was the tiredness, the itchy skin from lack of sleep, or maybe the dream still lingered. I bought a can of coke from the machine in the tower foyer, fancying the ten heaped tablespoons of sugar could chase all trace away. I settled in watching the rain thicken and howl, E numbers scouring my palette. It was then I saw the flowers.

Someone had fallen, for real and not in dream, fallen right to the spot where half opened flowers drooped in the rain. Whoever had fallen, had hit. Hard. Nine point eight metres per second every second for fourteen floors, travelling upwards of forty miles per hour when, head first, their short journey ended abrupt. A concrete smile.

There was a spot back where I grew up. A dirty stretch of filthy asphalt and tar, dull metal railings still bent from the impact, even after time. Every year the flowers bloom in cellophane, wrapped in artificial flower food, welded to the railings with layer upon layer of slowly melting tape. Dirt, carbon dioxide crusted to fall like snow, gathers turning the clear plastic to smudge. The flowers choke. The messages, with love and missing you, are erased. Not just hidden but erased. Faded. Melted. It takes so little time for the poison to blanche ink, for the sentiments to vanish in the haze of articulated exhaust. You pass those flowers every day for a month . Maybe more. Then they disappear. I always hoped those left behind came and took them down. Hoped they hadn’t fallen, crushed beneath the wheels like she was.

Flowers are like that. Perfect yet pointless, dying slowly as the people they commemorate. Like we all are. Those flowers on the railing, dead, dying, crusted or rotting, seemed such a poor testament to a life. As did the flowers where whoever hit, a couple of bunches sagging under the weight of water, hunched like sad shoulders. Nothing but flowers now, a life reduced to sound bite and past tense. Tall tales told tainted in the retelling. Exaggeration and desperation of those who try to remember the happy times. Words are never enough, yet always too much.

I didn’t know who yet. I did know they fell under there own steam. A peculiarity of the towers, designed no doubt to try and prevent such unpleasantness, or at least slow it down, was that no window would open fully enough for a person to slip out. Only the subtle use of a screwdriver, or a hell of a lot of brute force could part metal from wood and allow someone to jump. Either way, jump they had.

What had they thought on the way down? That question stuck. It was more than just morbid fascination, for when else but the moment before the end is thought clear and true?

I felt tired. Even more so. The ten heaped of sugar was helping none, in fact a dull ache was forming in the side of my head that wouldn’t shift till evening. Whoever had jumped had gotten to me. Maybe it was because of my dream, a coincidence that felt anything but. I’d thought I was still falling, perhaps now I’d hit the ground. Maybe it was the tiredness bringing sentiment to the fore. Maybe it was a cynical excuse to avoid the blank lines awaiting blue ink. Or maybe it was because my arm still ached.

I looked to it. The scars had faded. Most where healed completely, a little lie white like my skin pretending nothing had ever happened. You had to strain to see the remaining lines like cracks in a frozen pond. Not long before the back of my arm had been a portrait painted in blood, a landscape barren but beautiful. It told its own story, a snapshot of time and place, of mind and waste, of a year and a few days.

Time was lost. I watched the rain, how people rushed through it and how it spilled to overfilled drains, overwhelmed and underused. I couldn’t really make sense of anything, too many thoughts refusing to lie, till I turned my eyes skyward. The seagull hung motionless. A storm blew around it, yet braced and bent to updrafts and dark paths it didn’t even sway. Effortless it seemed, though effort it took to fly in the face of such power. It held level, all that way up, to the very place Whoever had stepped out, a sentry sensing the whys and the wheres. That bird had seen. Seen Whoever sniff the cold night air that one last time, and heard the little scream cut and caught cold force by concrete concourse. The bird had seen it all, the motive and the means, the last will and petulance.

It got strange then, even stranger than dreaming of falling as the fallen fell. For I swear I floated out into the rain, as high as that bird, braced and bent against that power. Out of body, out of mind too probably but, for a few brief moments I hung, as gentle and still against the storm as that bird, and I saw too. The thing of it was I saw much more besides, a birds eye view few can claim. Whoever, was a single solitary and melancholy soul, but no life is lived alone. From that view and though those birds eyes, under whoever’s feet and through the walls they used to punch, the other thousand hundred and forty five lives lived over, around and through Whoever’s. Some just passed through, others lingered a while longer, either way you couldn’t tell one story without the rest. Behind the glass and brick, every floor, I could see the stories the bird had seen. The confessions and the crimes. The lies and alibis, hello’s and goodbyes. The hurt the pain the driving rain the insane the mundane, the change, the same and the same again. How a whole year had passed paths crossed. How behind every curtain twitch lay a room, every room a story and every story an epic, stranger than, strangers to me.

Soon enough, having never left I suppose, I was back cowering from the rain and lectures, swirling the dregs of my coke, looking back up at that bird. I stood and thought on it. All of it.

My granddad, god rest, had told his tainted tale. A relative, a brother or a cousin, some blood. Much blood. All over the walls. A cut jugular, slashed really, a jagged buzz saw carved by his own hand. Granddad had spent the best part of a weekend with a bucket of hot soapy water scouring worn walls. “It was the only thing I could do,” he explained, “I couldn’t have his wife coming home to that.” But hearing that story I always thought that something of his last moment should have remained. Blood on the walls seems right. ‘This was me,’ written in red, fading to brown in the pale sunlight of years passing. Something should stand and testify. Suicide deserves that, needs it even. Flowers say sorry and perhaps that’s not what needs saying. Fire and brimstone. Condemning. Condoning. Damnation. Damn fool. Damn shame.

The fuss and muss that whoever left behind had been cleaned, sanitised and sterile, the concrete washed of blood and jaw bone. The only thing that remained was the tale. So it was, with blood red eyes and dark circles, I found the story. And so it is I tell you.