jump theory

A brain aneurysm – a surge of energy to sabotage the circuit – he switches in a nanosecond to the most bizarre of moods even he can’t recognise it. Standing on the second storey he feels like he could easily and accidentally jump off without even realising what he is doing. Second storey safety and false fantasies of crash mats. It’s so easy to think you could survive the jump listening to the most fucked up of music. 

His muscles don’t remember how to sit still so his outside conjures up light images and his blood cells run races against each other where everyone loses. He won’t look you in the eye. 

The guy sitting at the bus stop can’t sit still either. The two of them are disintegrating together in a hideous symphony and the first feels as though he might vomit and is trying to cry but all that happens is his eyes leak slightly. On his neck are faint blushed dark red splodges from where his ex-girlfriend kissed him and he can’t remember what she looks like because all he saw was the top of her head and the black cavities of her smudgy eyeliner scooping out her eyes while she successfully cried – envious that she can drain herself of her fluids but he can’t. He can’t tell fiction from reality and what are either of those things anyway because they leak into each other like her make-up leaks into his neck and he doesn’t even know anymore if trust is worth investing in or what he will do when he no longer has a rooftop. 

Maybe living high is what’s making him want to jump. He’s feeling so strange he presses both hands around her beautiful strange head while they are kissing and she is smelling like hints of blackberry so she doesn’t feel a thing but just takes pleasure in the weight of his knuckles and his collar bone under her lips, until he presses harder and his hands become closer to each other and she can only think about the colour of what she drank tonight. Neither of them have scars but they both give their bodies up in order to remember what living feels like. It’s something like imagining, they decide. Breathing feels so surreal and he admits that he is utterly, utterly frightened and she says she is too, literally right out of her own skull but she has to leave on a plane, her plane is leaving now.

Your plane is not leaving he tells her. Your plane is not leaving. Your plane is not leaving. Why is it not leaving she asks, her head a different shape. My plane is leaving now. No, your plane is not leaving, he says, because I am afraid and so your plane has been delayed perhaps indefinitely. Ad infinitum. Your plane is not leaving, it is not. The only plane that is leaving is the one off the top of this building, and he drags her out onto the soot-covered roof and shows her the bottom of the city. Look at this, he says. Do you think this is big enough to be a runway? It’s not. So again, your plane is not leaving. This is not an airport.

And he cries honestly now and he cries from every pore and every opening in his body like an animal that dies and is rid of all its fluids. 

This is not an airport, he says. He stands on the edge of the rooftop and tells her, I am the only plane. I’m going to take flying lessons. I am going to see things you have never seen before from heights you can’t even imagine – how can you possibly imagine heights if you can’t even understand breathing, that’s basic biology right?

He invites her to go back into his room and curl her fruit-caked body into a chair. Make yourself comfortable, he says. There is never enough room in plane seats so seize the opportunity. Pretend you have been upgraded to first class. Here’s the truth baby: your brain is beautiful but I found other sets of grey already.