What Happens Next?

I. Out of the Sunrise

I lived on the streets for six years of my life, by choice. I took four steps away from my single parent dwelling and never looked back.
Was it hard? Yes.
Did I do anything illegal? I would like to plead the fifth.
What made me come home?
It wasn’t that I came home, it was that I found a home, a few short moments before going over the edge.

Let’s go back to the question above: did I do anything illegal?
Short answer: you do what you need to do in order to survive.
Long answer: I have several track marks up my arms, I still have the occasional sniffle, and I’m constantly flipping the medallion in my pocket. Yes, I robbed people. Yes, I stole a car or two. Yes, I broke into a grocery store late at night and acquired all the beef jerky, toothpaste and cans of beans I could load into a cart.
I’ve paid all of that back, by the way, I paid everyone back, but there are two people I can never pay back: I can’t repay Jesus Christ and I can’t repay the man who found me standing on the edge of his office.

I climbed onto the fire escape to the second floor and opened the door with little effort—or maybe it was an extreme amount, I don’t know, it was all a haze that morning. My arm was bleeding from my drunken hands straying to stab a needle into a vein that’s wasn’t there—until it finally was and the sweet and sour feelings mixed into serenity and death. I dragged myself up the stairs to the top floor and swore that I was either going to fly like an eagle or plummet to the ground in a splatacular display of street artwork. A win-win either way.
I didn’t want to die that day—but for that sense of time—it seemed like the right thing to do, so I broke into an office, smashed a window and climbed out onto the ledge.

“L'appel du vide,” I said to myself as I looked out to the building across the street and casually walked to the corner of the building. The wind was quiet and so was the city with the only noise for the next few minutes being the chorus of voices in my head: the disdain I felt combined with every other memory, sped up and screaming in stereo. I sat on the corner like a gargoyle, or maybe more like Batman, brooding over the world as it was waking up to start the day and I was up there, waiting to end my life.