The dreams and fabric of reality around me disintigrated into a melting white hot flame of rage and dispair. All around the cars were screaming by as I wandered down the middle of the interstate deflecting the oncoming howls with the palms of my hand. They honked in deference to the display of insane reality as though some how they could understand what it would take to stand right in the middle of the world and have all the information in it passed through your frontal cortex.

I saw him again that day spanning the second and third girder of the bridge. The look about his face recalled to mind the view of a calm insanity. He began to cry as slowly he pushed himself too and fro over the abyss. There was peace and fear in the eyes as a mental battle was portrayed to me in the .5 seconds that I saw him. I wanted to get out and stop, somehow keeping him from jumping but I guess a part of me wanted to step out over the ledge and look down.

They never report on people jumping from bridges on the news, so I never did get to find out if he jumped. I looked all day as though somehow the news would allay me of my responsibility towards a life that careened over the edge of that bridge.

The black nothingness of calm acceptability probably ate away at him while all of his friends danced around the burning ashes of his former life. Perhaps there was nothing left in the end that was worth saving. There could have been an empty room at some shelter that held a dog-eared book that gave him solace, but now in this timespace there was no-way to know if that man had plunged into the waters below or pulled himself back.

Too and fro, swaying over the rippling blue current he rocked as I passed by. I was just a casual observer in his mind, but a thought occured to me as I left him behind me. What if perhaps I was controlling this all? In some fashion I was strapped to a hospital bed right now in a coma from getting into a multi car collision. This whole world disintigrating into a mess of random corners and odd coincidences. I began to concentrate on having him come back onto the bridge, but he just obscenely swayed into the breeze without casting a backwards glance at me. I knew then that either I was going to kill him or he would destroy my world. I couldn't suffer the departing thoughts that careened around my lobes as I slowly tore into the fabric of the fact that perhaps I wasn't even me anymore.

I slowly pushed him over the edge into an oblivion of not knowing. I assigned him a death of anonymity. Into a black hole of cold inky darkness he fell into nothingness.

Slowly and surely the world tried to return as all my thoughts began to conjure up the idea that perhaps I could keep him there in perpetuity. So there I see him again in my thoughts and memory. Rocking over a plunge into the great unkown. Dead and Alive to be remembered by myself as always someone in purgatory.

I believe that to be better than the hell of total nothingness that I would assign him.

So there in the interstate, was my test of belief. That in the world those things such as pain and love and hatred weren't all just another matter of my imagination. I could feel now the straps digging into the sides of my body as doctors called for a nurse.

I could hear the people calling for me. Calling me home into the disintigration of the reality that was around me, and even in those moments of madness I often quesitoned if I could possibly be confused.