The Jump

Michael

It was easy to explain why I wanted to jump off a building on Christmas. I felt sad. Doesn’t everyone sometimes feel desperate and dissatisfied with life? Well, I was sad. It was that simple. I was frantic and baffled at the time, so I wanted to jump off a building. I just don't understand why every single psychologist thinks that I have a mental disorder. What is with people these days?

Think of a situation that you got fired from your job in Hong Kong. Then there is this job in Sydney with high pay and a beautiful house to live in. You would probably make a list like this:

Goods:

-High pay

-House

-Beautiful view

-Starting over with new career

Bads:

-Family and friends

-Easy-to-reach shops that work 24/7

Now change it to life and death, and everything makes sense now, doesn’t it? There were so few reasons for me not to jump, and that there were some benefits from jumping as well. It was just logical. Well, I was sure that my family and friends would come over my grave once in a while, so I would still ‘see’ them through a pile of dirt. And I wouldn’t have any shops to go to, so I would be fine. Well, here I still am, so I won’t get the opportunity to get to go to Sydney yet.

Ariel

I remember that I told my parents that I was going for a party. I was planning for that trip since June, though the circumstances now were quite different from that during June. I just felt helpless. People just staring at their phones, paying no attention to their surroundings. Everyone’s seems to have such a wide social circle, reading much more about others’ personal life. But in the end, people just pay attention interacting with those across the ocean rather than care about those next to you. I guess it’s just ordinary.

I have always loved drawing, I’ve never thought for one moment that I would forfeit this interest and hobby. Now that I’m studying art and design, I’ve turned to drawing and publishing my work full-time. Everything was fine, people were ‘like’ing my drawings, my blog post and Facebook was getting more and more followers. The thing is, people just pay attention to the number of ‘like’s they get each post and how many followers, and nothing else. I’m obviously not that type of person. I just can’t bear that whenever you want to talk with others, they just face their phones and disregard you.

OK, back onto drawing. I have always been comfortable with it, and I trust that the many years drawing would surely serve as something that matters. I’ve been publishing my ‘work’ every once in a while, and I expected some encouragement from friends at least. I did, really I did. However, when my posts get to more people, some people are pacifist, being all but about criticizing others’ work. Soon, all I could see on the comments bar was ‘hate mail’, something like ‘stop drawing! You’re getting all the patterns wrong’ and ‘The presence of such people like you make the design industry such a failure’. I mean like, seriously? I’m just trying to fulfill my dreams here, and you go on with like saying that how I’ve got my art designs wrong. Then at the university, my professor yells at me for days on end on how I don’t understand the concept of art and how I should change my work. It’s actually just the issue of different styles, that’s all. Is there a need to change my style to fit yours? It was until June. That was when I couldn’t take any more of it. The hate mail, the rude comments, the yelling professor, everything. That’s why I decided to jump off a factory building in Kowloon.

Michael

Well, I think that I have to say something about my ‘oh so sad’ past now, don’t I? Firstly, I lost her. She was just suddenly, gone. All I remember past the previous dates and star-gazing was that we had an argument. She got angry and I got angry, then I told her to leave and never come back. So she did.

I’ve never been quite the same since. I started to slack in schoolwork, have random emotional breakdowns, listening to ‘Stitches’ by Shane Mendes, and end up thinking what was she doing at that moment. I could imagine her holding a guy’s hand, dancing under the moonlight… In the end, you can say that my grades dropped. Though it didn’t matter in university, it mattered in medical school. You can’t fail any test or exam, and you should score high marks for each retest. Those days have been my best of days, so I ended up with two consecutive fails in the same test. 

Fail? I have already lost one vital part of my life. I remembered her smile, her warm gaze at you at sunset. The warmth was all I wanted for now.

Ian

All I can say is that this is not my body. I was meant to be a woman, but here I am, a woman in man’s flesh. Every time I looked into the mirror, I felt something extra under my bare skin, deep inside my heart. It was her. The other me. 

Right now I’m in a dilemma. The staring from the people on the streets, the small murmurs when I go eat with my husband, it is just painful. I cannot bear that this society is against homosexual marriages. If people were originally all gay or lesbians, those who are ‘straight’ would be the odd ones out, right? Unfortunately, I live in a world that is mostly ‘straight’, so now my husband and I are the odd ones out.

It never occurred to me that I would want to suicide on a winter day. My husband and I were a joyous couple, and the stares and remarks from others were ignored. Though over time, things have started to increase in magnitude. People were making more and more comments on such issues, and people were reacting much more vigorously to the word ‘homosexual’ nowadays. Soon, it was proven too much. I couldn’t bear the stares from others, as well as having nightmares of being beat up by a yelling crowd every night. I walk through the cold streets, reading icy stares from those walking by. Many just stared at their ice blue monitors of their phones, oblivious even if a car came crashing into them.

But like, what is there to say? I mean, what do you expect me to tell you? That I am 'psycologically imbalanced'? That's what society wants to hear, that people that want to jump off buildings are psycologically imbalanced beings, and that 'normal people' like straight people should not jump off cliffs. What's the logic behind that? Why does society always have a bias, that the more popular choice is the norm fo society, and that the less popular choices, like suicide and being gay, shouild be ignored or discriminated? See? No point.

Chloe

I told Jonathan that I was heading to visit Aunt Margo for the weekend, what I didn’t tell him was that I wouldn’t be coming back. In fact, I was going to jump off a building. All he knows is that I have a very dear aunt named Aunt Margo that I go to visit every month or so. The truth is, none of my relatives live near my place, and that I just walk on the street meaninglessly to fulfill as the ‘visit’ to Aunt Margo.

Jonathan was one of the best things that happened to me throughout my whole lifetime. He was caring, loving, and makes you feel some special kind of warmth that surrounds you. He is diligent and good at his schoolwork, and that he has high hopes to finish college and find a successful career. The only thing is that I am divorced. The bad things is that that bastard Jason didn’t even send a penny to help out with our lives. I mean like, really? You have several millions of dollars, and you cannot spare a few hundred for your son? That’s just selfish.

I didn’t think money could be so much of a problem. All we had to do was to just have breakfast on weekends, skip lunch once in a while, and to learn how to reuse. That isn’t so hard, right? We’ve always lived like this, and that several more years would be enough to bear. Oh, was I so wrong. These years have been like a rolling a snowball down a slope. One small problem became a huge problem, and at some time it became too much it was an avalanche.

The problem started at around two years ago. Jonathan had just finished his medical bachelor’s degree, and that he was preparing for his specialist training. The problem was, I couldn’t find enough money to fund him to study. Even with him working as a private tutor for several kids, it wasn’t enough. At first, we started to squeeze all the money we could get our hands on. In the end, we were three thousand dollars away from paying tuition fees. In the end, Jonathan luckily made it into radiologist training. The thing was, I was left with literally no money. That’s why I wanted to jump off a building, so that he could apply for financial support and live a better life that he deserves.

To be Continued...