Jumper

Tom was a writer. A good one, too. I hadn't read any of his stuff before I had met him. He wasn't famous. But he wrote a column in the paper. They were all about his experiences, which were, at times, bizarre and unbelievable. He wrote about things I'd never dreamed of doing before. He'd been sky diving, he's trekked through the desert. He loved to do things that were risky. He'd even literally swam with the sharks. I don't even know how we ended up together. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was sweet and charming, even if he was reckless. He told me that if he had survived that jump he was going to write about it. Then he tells me that he's glad that he didn't jump, otherwise we probably would have never gotten a chance. He ended up writing about how he'd met me and how he'd gotten me to go on a date with him.

Another great thing about Tom, he was always there for me after I had work. And that would be several times a day, at any time. We lived in New York City, so there was a lot of people, and apparently a lot of them were suicidal. When anyone was attempting suicide, I was the first one to be called. I worked for the police station, and people used to call there, and then they'd call me but we figured out that that wasted too much time. So I now had a second phone number at my apartment for people to call if they saw anyone attempting suicide. I also had another cell phone, in case I was out. This saved a little bit more time and I was pretty good at getting to where I needed to be before anything serious happened. Sometimes things went well, but sometimes things went bad which was when I needed Tom the most. He was like my own personal therapist. He'd hold me close to him and keep telling me that it wasn't my fault. I always took it personally when I couldn't talk someone out of killing themselves. No matter how many times I'd been told that it wasn't my fault.

Now, you're probably wondering why I even have this job. And the answer is, that when I was in high school, I had found out that one of my closest friends wanted to kill herself. I had been able to talk her out of it. Then when I'd hear about suicides in the news, I'd think of that persons family and friends and what they're probably going through. Then I thought about how I would have felt if my friend had killed herself and I just couldn't take it. So that's when I decided that I wanted it to be my job to talk people out of suicide. Like I said, though, it unfortunately doesn't always work.