OVER THE BRIDGE

Jingwei liked to watch over the San Francisco Bridge and play God with her own life. Nothing cleared the perpetual cloud of depression that hung over her better than knowing she was just one step away from this life into the next, or even possibly about to fall into a complete and permanent state of non-existence as she more hoped was the case. The idea that you had the ability to make such a momentous decision whenever you felt compelled to end it all seemed like freedom to her as did the idea of no longer having to endure the tyranny of merely existing, so exhausted had she become with the endless pressure of filling up time for days, weeks and months. But perhaps what fascinated her even more than these morbid questions of life and death were the few, fleeting images and thoughts that pulled her back from the brink each time that made her hesitate before committing to the final act of killing herself.

It wasn't quite a flashing before the eyes she witnessed in these moments as she prepared to let go of her life but more a gallery of single, static images that had each been placed in distressed gold picture frames like those she'd often walked past in the auction house where her mother worked. She'd worked there, too, on days off from school and in the holidays so concluded that was where the idea must have been drawn from, that endless reservoir deep inside her subconscious where all the crazy thoughts and fantasies of suicide lurked. The merging of Jingwei's personal memories hanging in that place where people went to sell their accumulated possessions and artefacts for money seemed somehow apt and exactly the sort of detail her therapist would have had a field day with if she'd still been alive.

The current framed image that Jingwei's mind had thrown up for her was that of her absent father, a first-chair violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic who'd left her mother and her when she was only eight years old for a fellow musician in the orchestra. Since then, Jingwei had gone through every fantasy of revenge to punish her father but now, hanging above the bridge with her eyes closed tight shut she had a sudden urge to speak to him again after all these many years and ask him why he'd never made contact. It seemed somewhat ironic that it might be her father (whom she barely acknowledged by that title) that might be the reason that saved her from falling this time.

But then, just as an erratic squall of wind forced Jingwei to open her eyes from where she was currently suspended above the traffic moving quickly beneath her feet, she suddenly felt her grip loosen around the bridge light she was hanging from and fell silently with only the faintest of screams that to someone passing may have sounded eerily like the high note of a violin.