Glass skyscrapers permeated the night sky at imperceptible heights. Hundreds of rows of similar structures populated a city that stretched for miles. Hovering cars whisked by, lights blazed in every direction, music from every time and place filled the air. People laughed and shrieked in joy, running around in groups in the thousands of buildings in the city. The air was crisp and clear, the atmosphere was light and festive, the people were carefree and jovial. The city was the embodiment of life, of joy, of utopia.

This was the world the boy had created for himself. It was his escape from the monotony of everyday life, a fantasy where the struggles of the life that was forced upon him were nonexistent. The world inside him existed in a realm of infinite time and space, unbounded by reality or reason, yet, somehow, it could never match the humbling enormity of the world around him.

In his world, he was powerful and well-known. It had been that way since its inception, since before it was imagined. For as long as he could remember, there had never been a day that he was not fulfilled in his fantasy. He was its main focus, its raison d’être. It could not be any other way, or it would not be his world any longer. Nevertheless, it was ripping at the seams. His imagination could not conjure up new activities to drown his boredom and pain in. He repeated the same tasks from years ago perfunctorily, straining to find gratification in them. His world could no longer sustain him, as the world around him would not allow it to.

At first, he felt helpless, crushed by the whirlwind of responsibility that had materialized seemingly out of thin air. Once he regained his footing, he immediately lost it again to the faceless dictators instructing him to perform meaningless tasks for no apparent reason. Next followed hopelessness from his inability to maintain any semblance of reliability or trustworthiness in the face of insurmountable tedium. His emotions propelled themselves into a haze of hysteria that paralyzed him in everything he attempted to do. The boy reached a tipping point and one day observed that emotion was unachievable. He could not feel ecstasy, sorrow, apprehension, or pride. He felt nothing- absolute and involuntary apathy. He became stalwart, calculating, and utilitarian, not because he desired to be so, but because he could not exist any other way.

Thus he stood precariously on the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge on a September evening, grasping a beam to keep his balance. He knew it was cliché to jump from a bridge, especially the Golden Gate, but he was not there to replicate the suicides of the hundreds before him. He had been enamored with its architecture and design long before he had decided to jump from it, but the boy was more enamored with the opportunity to choose the method and location of his demise than the bridge. It was irrelevant how his life ended, as long as it was his decision.

He took deep breaths of the brisk sea breeze. The city lights in the distance were softened by a light fog. This same fog prevented the dying light from illuminating the hills across the bay, but it was just thin enough for the boy to be able to see the stars in the night sky. He became absorbed in the same train of thought that had plagued him for years, of his purpose, or lack thereof. He futilely attempted to conceive the immensity of the solar system, of the galaxy, of the entire universe, but he knew he could not even comprehend the small sliver of space that he owned inside his head.

He had never been particularly religious, leaving the task of discovering his purpose up to him alone. He liked to believe that there was an inherent order to everything, but he could not place himself in it. He found no allure in a job title or in letters after his name. He could not even articulate the purpose of having a purpose. He had begun to believe that there was none, and any quest to find one would be fruitless.

He accepted his insignificance zealously, using it as an excuse to delve deeper into his fantasy world. Nevertheless, the monotony and anguish of the other world he resided in tainted it irreparably. He could no longer bear to daydream, for the purpose of his world was to alleviate the pain he felt outside of it, and now pain was ubiquitous.

Shouting from below forced him back to reality. The boy had tried to be as inconspicuous as it is possible to be while attempting suicide, but it was not enough. Joggers, runners, couples, parents with strollers, and other passersby had stopped to gape and stare. Some went further and pleaded with him to come down, some fueled by empathy, and some by sympathy, but all by an egotistical obsession with freedom from guilt; others cheered him on, at ease with the fact that they were promoting the death of a person whose existence they had not been aware of for even five minutes. All kept a distance from him, afraid of provoking him, but more importantly, afraid of gaining a connection to him.

Ambivalence was not a possibility he had prepared for. When the boy made the decision to end his life, he had believed that it was an entirely rational decision. He was in pain, therefore, he thought, he must end it. He repeated that thought to himself thousands of times in the weeks leading up to his suicide attempt, silencing any dissenting opinions or flashes of reason. Once he stood on the railing, those concerns began to creep in slowly, until he realized the major contradiction of his line of reasoning-- his disbelief in an afterlife or resurrection. How could he possibly justify ending his pain by ending his existence, if his existence was the only force capable of providing an alternative to pain? He believed this conflict to be irreconcilable and contemplated stepping down from the railing for a brief moment, but decided against it, not desiring to placate the pleaders below or disappoint the cheerers. It was preferable to remain in limbo, struggling to maintain his balance, than to indicate to his audience that they had influenced his decision in any manner.

His attention was drawn to the sparks of intermittent light in the night sky. He knew that it was impossible for his mind to truly perceive the extent of the universe beyond those sparks and that his imaginary world could never match harsh reality. He based his conclusion that the decision was made and that there was no cause for ambivalence on this realization. He was already steadfast in his devotion to taking his own life.

Flocks of ravens passed by overhead. The boy could not see where they came from or why there were so many. They were eerily quiet, not making a noise and traveling in perfect formation. One flock stumbled, however, and circled down towards him, slowly spinning as it fell. He thought it seemed very much like the airplanes he had seen crashing in low-budget war movies, except these ravens were much more directed.

The birds approached him slowly, maintaining their formation the entire time. He heard cawing and shrieking, and wondered if he just hadn’t heard it before, but he suspected another reason. The boy expected the ravens to disperse and land along the bridge just like dozens of other flocks of birds that evening, but they did not; the ravens stayed spinning until they had completely surrounded him. Their shrieking was louder than ever, their wings flapped furiously, and they pecked at his face, his limbs, and his torso, never quite injuring him, but consistently getting just close enough to distress him.

The ravens had him encompassed in a whirlwind of despair. He could not see in any direction and he felt he was suffocating due to their extreme proximity. He attempted to bat them off and failed, only causing transient interruptions in the violent spiral. The ravens seemed to be attacking his eyes at this point, and the boy could no longer see what he was up against. Both factions of the crowd behind him gasped, as they had realized before he had that he had let go of the beam in his frantic struggle to remain balanced. The boy fell forwards, flailing in mid-air, and rushed towards the water.

The few seconds between his fall and his crash with the water seemed to him the longest of his life. He tried to recall what people were expected to do in this situation, but none of those burdens applied to him. He did not see his life flash before his eyes; he did not wish to spend one final moment with his family; he did not regret never achieving all his failed ambitions. He simply accepted the inevitability of his impending demise, and assured himself that this is what he wanted all along. He simply regretted not being able to choose its terms, as the ravens had decided it for him.

His last thought was that his world was oblivious to its own demise.

Dozens of bones in his body shattered the moment he hit the water. His internal organs ruptured and ceased functioning immediately. The boy was dead before he could feel pain.

His world, his consciousness, his existence, all ended abruptly. The fantasies of his world had existed just a second before, but no longer. The infinite complexity of his world disappeared in an instant.

The Coast Guard heard of his supposed suicide shortly afterwards. They scooped up his body, just like the many others before him, and inattentively placed him in a body bag. The medical examiner would never know that he was not at fault, that the ravens were actually to blame.

The crowd had already dispersed hours before, pleaders and cheerers alike tapping away on their slabs of luminescent glass, indifferent to the death of a perfect world.