and I pause the moment he steps off (what I wanted in youth: for him to stop badgering me), fine penny loafers scuffing the sky. I pause before the body becomes bullet, becomes a blood-flower blooming on cement (was I still sleeping in my mom’s bed; was I still wearing her nightgowns; was I chasing girls yet; was I was I was I—). His hair mid-flutter from breeze brisk for that late in spring. Was the building a bell tower? Did he think himself a more tragic Quasimodo, his whole being—receding hairline (the pictures show, even that young), beer-induced belly beginning to convex his center— one great hunched back? It would be easy for me to mock his pain. Poor petrified man not knowing how to make sense of his singular life. But how can I judge him for trying when I, too, thought my privileged life was a host of menacing claws clamoring for a rip of my skin; when I, too, saw the edges of things and pined for the slippery shift, for my body to be set loose like a kite wriggling in flight. Anything but that plain, earthly life. It would be too easy to scroll past the image, leave it undeveloped in the dark room of my mind. I want him to have been better. I want me to be better than I am. So instead I imagine he falls not down but up, feet-first through the glass ceiling of another life, and when he lands, he exits the water there onto the bright white stones of a river’s bank.