Roof Top View

Boston looks a lot like most cities, once you climb a tall building and look out over it as a whole. Individual landmarks get lost in the crisscross of gridded blocks and freeway divisions.

From up here, I can see foreshortened thoroughfares disappear into singular points in the distance. The well defined antenna and satellite dishes of the surrounding roof tops shrink in the background, appearing like bristles or freshly cut blades of grass of a metallic lawn.

I’ve lived my whole life in this city, but from where I stand I can only pick out one or two landmarks. The bridge and an intersection three blocks down. How small it all seems.

I know that beyond the horizon there is an entire world but it seems like fiction, a chapter from some sci fi novel I read five years ago and have forgotten about. It’s out there, the world, but as far as I know it’s just a story people tell themselves to get by.

What if Boston is all there is? What if ‘the outside world’ is just a rumor that people convince themselves is real? This silliness flashes through my head and I let it go.

A plane is moving slowly across the sky. It looks like it’s barely moving. I know, thanks to a google search, that passenger planes fly around 600 miles an hour. The sky suddenly seems very big to me and I look away, back to the grid of humanity that sprawls below me.

Pigeons are flying in orderly figure eights. They swing around the tops of skyscrapers and back again. They can fly and that’s the best they can come up with? A figure eight leading nowhere.

The maintenance man opens the door leading to the roof.

He’s eyeballing me.

“You ain't one of those jumpers are you?” He asks.

“No. I don’t have the guts.” I respond.

“Good. Keep it that way.” He says and moves to an air conditioning unit that’s clacking differently than the others.

I hadn’t thought about jumping until now. It would solve some issues in my life, all of them to be realistic. But what’s the point? Everyone asks about the meaning of life but no one seems to be interested in the meaning of death. Life, we just pop into reality without being asked if we want to or not. Death, there’s a choice involved. Every day we don’t put a bullet in our heads is a day we choose not to die. Let the mopey high school kids worry about the meaning of life. Me? I’m a writer. I tackle the real questions. I trade in death.