• This is it... He thought quietly to himself. This is the end. What I've wanted for so long... Around the young man was the roaring life of the river below him, and the muttering people walking and driving past him on the bridge he was standing on. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and just watching the water pass below him.
    Not a single person. Not one reached out to help.
    Offered a helping hand, when he practically begged someone -anyone- to help him. He hated feeling this way: alone, all the time, in one of the largest cities this side of the Rockies. Yeah, he had family, friends, but they didn't spare him a second glance. Even now, no one looked at him, he saw not one smiling face in the crowd as he looked around.

    So what to do, what to do?

    He was just a little higher now, standing on the railing, barely holding on for support. The wind was rather violent over the rushing river, pushing him back and forth, but he didn't hear it, barely felt it. What he felt was the release. All the tension left him, the desperate need to get away from it all left, temporarily put at ease by knowing the feeling would be satisfied soon.

    He couldn't hear the wind, or the people behind him nor the cars behind them. What he heard was the quiet. He found the place inside himself that brought him those moments before that said No! Not yet! But right now that voice was silent, silently begging for him to let go....

    There was a large gust of wind - he'd been hoping there would be, he didn't know if he could have done it himself; and he fell forwards, over the railing, away from the people and the cars and the hatred and depression that smothered him every day.

    As he fell, he didn't scream. Instead he closed his eyes and remembered that no one smiled at him. Not a single person. So he smiled instead.

    As he fell, he felt at peace. When the water took him, at first it rejected his body as did the rest of the world, but slowly it did what the world around him never had done: accepted him. And it took him far away from the city and the lights and the noise.

    _____________________________

    Weeks later, as the police and FBI were searching a missing man's apartment, they found this note written in his handwriting.

    "I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump"