Jumper

She lives near the top floor of a tall high-rise in an apartment her closest acquaintance once described derisively as "post-pubescent and pre-informed", words she now has tattooed in Victorian script above her left shoulder blade, sad evidence of her willingness to vandalize herself. The homeless man who watches her come and go from the post of his eternal vigil beside the mail drop box on the sidewalk far below thinks of her as Asian, though she is half Puerto Rican and half American mixto. Her window high above the street is always open, symbolizing for you the endless opportunity funded for her by her wealthy parents with whom she never speaks. "I am an artist," she lies, when people ask her what she does. In truth, she occasionally throws pieces of bread out through the open window at the unsuspecting world, but she doesn't describe herself like this because it wouldn't impress anyone as much as a fantasy of art might. Her only art is standing naked with her eyes closed and her arms upraised in front of the blast of harsh, angry guitar raging from her expensive music system, art that her neighbors all hate because, all too often, they get to hear it and feel it but they never get to see it. The violence of this music rouses something less dead in her soul, something almost alive, almost vital, if unhealthy. This music gives her the scraps of resolve she requires to throw on something too revealing and head out past the homeless man to abuse herself around town, to let others have a go at her, to crawl home to the elevator that loves her. For her, this life is an apartment in an empty world, where she's not an artist, not even Asian. For her, death is like bread falling naked to the world below, guitar music fading away far above.

Hello, friends. I hope your feet are on the ground, so to speak.

Later. Love.