This is a recollection of a dark incident that occurs almost everyday.  At least one soul loses it’s will to live and decides to take the plunge. Read about one of those souls in ‘The Last Plunge’.

He held it off as much as he could; The empty feeling in him gnawing at his insides ready to pounce at the first ray of white light forever absent. The loneliness got to him though, like a tiger ready to pounce at it’s prey, never missing a beat; it came like a wild, unwanted, fearless animal; unwanted yet always there…..lurking in the shadows of a hopeless desire of darkness. He never stood a chance.
Every morning was the same routine; get up, get out, hold your tongue until your heart gives up. Never speak or shout or cry out in agony for no one could listen. The one’s that do, have their own demons to defeat; their own cries to swallow; their own lives to sustain with barely-there beats of their own hearts. A mind’s strength really was a wonder, after all he had held the inevitable off for so long, but he decided, no more. He decided he would give into the alluring sense of safety of the emptiness and the sense of peace that he hoped the darkness would provide.
He had no reasons left to live for, he could feel no satisfaction after every painful breath he drew. It was a done deal for him. He was done. All his family, lost because his own actions, his one true love held him at an arms length for his lovely, destructive addiction gave her reason to doubt him. Yet he couldn’t smash the bottle of old monk he still carried.
Sunday night, drunk out of his mind; questions of the universe’s purpose to dull the  importance of life swirled in his mind as he exhaled a foggy breath on the brooklyn bridge and prayed for the blank side of his brain to overcome his thoughts and save him from himself. And yet, despite of the realisation of his mistake and his fatal flaw, he held on to the bottle like it was the last thread to his life hoping it would provide him the peace that death could not, for he was not brave enough to ask for it yet. He smiled as he climbed a step on the bridge; ‘Ha! I think I’m brave enough.’

‘Not enough to save yourself and salvage what’s left of your pathetic life.’ He looked around but there was no one that could have said anything.

It was eerily empty, just like the beat of his lifeless heart. He was talking to himself he realised. Like alternate personalities. A laugh escaped him; this was what was left of him; a crazed lunatic having to talk himself out of either being brave or destroying the one chance that the universe had given him in the form of a life. He took another sip of the bottle as he closed his eyes and climbed unsteadily rest of the way to the top of the bridge.

He uttered Carter Thomas’ words,

‘When you’re haunted by the spectre of your own sins,
Trying in vain to play them off as tragedies,
When even your conscious speaks with greying interest,
And you’re sweating bullets into guilt-drenched sheets,
See that yours is the face of the monsters in your nightmares,
You are the actions that denied compos mentis,
And while yours is the voice that whispers regret,
Remember yours were the choices that led you here to this.’

His belief in happiness extinguished, he decided he was brave enough; and with his constant companion-the ruin of his life- he took his last hopeful plunge.