While you are up here, standing at the edge of the roof with the intent to jump off, first look beneath you at the street below and all the people walking along it. There are probably a few joggers wearing backwards baseball caps and sports bras, couples strolling along hand in hand, young mothers rushing with their small children to run errands, even a homeless man or woman sitting on a nearby park bench.

Each and every single person on the street below may be a complete and utter stranger, but if you jump, they will forever be connected to you irrevocably. If you jump off the roof, your body will fall to the pavement below and you will hit like a smashed blood orange. One of those strangers will watch you fall and will be able to do absolutely nothing about it. Maybe it’s the jogger who watches you fall. Then, at the physical moment of impact, another stranger, maybe the young mother this time, will rush to your body, the life already draining from it like water from a bathtub, and will call 911. Her young child will witness your death and will have no idea what is going on.

You may think that the jogger or the mother or the child will forget about the incident, that you are just another body in a long line of bodies that they hear or read about in the obituaries every day, but that’s where you’re wrong. The jogger who watched you fall also watched you die, and will forever be changed by the fact that they were unable to save you. They may wake up in the middle of the night with a pulsing heart, covered in sweat, reliving the event over and over again, and in the dream they’ll be about to reach out a hand to grasp for you, or they’ll see an abandoned mattress lying by the side of the road, and they’ll drag it over to the spot beneath your body, but the dream will end seconds before you hit the ground. You’ll keep dying over and over again in their dreams, and over and over again, they won’t be able to do a thing about it. They’ll never stop hating themselves for it.

The mother who called 911? She’ll forever be changed too. Because she will be with her child, and she will be thinking about her child growing into an awkward, unsure teenager, someone who likes heavy metal and wants to be shut up in their room all the time. She will be worrying that what happened to you will happen to her child too, because her child witnessed it. She will be terrified that one day, her child is going to be so full of pain like a shook-up bottle that they will do anything to release the pressure of that bottle and let the pain out through a hole in the side of the plastic. That mother will spend the rest of her life in constant worry and fear that one day her child is going to be the person you were and will end up like you did.

For the child, it will be but a brief moment in a series of colored flashes that are the memories of children, but this one will stick out more so than the others. It will be what is termed as a “flashbulb memory” in psychology. Years later, they will be able to remember exactly what they were doing and wearing at the moment of your death. They will remember that they were wearing a red short-sleeved shirt, black shorts, and mini Birkenstocks, and that your body as it fell looked like an angel’s because of the way your arms were held out at your sides like wings. They will not know, at the moment of your death, what you were doing, but they will figure it out later, and they will know that they saw a life being purposely cut short before their very eyes.

Yes, your parents and friends will have to go to the hospital and identify your dead body, and they will hold your cold clammy hand and marvel at how their child, whom they brought into life like a candle into the dark, has now been removed from it before their time. Yes, your sister will no longer be able to joke with you about dates or her boyfriend’s unhygienic habits or her teacher’s tendency to chew on his fingernails while his class is taking a particularly difficult test. Yes, your grandparents will not attend your graduation because you will have not graduated, because it is no longer possible for you to walk across the stage and accept your diploma.

Yes, your friends will never be able to laugh with you and go out for ice cream with you, or gossip and relive favorite past memories of childhood and elementary school. Yes, they will move on into their lives with a hole the precise shape and size of you cut into those lives, like a cookie cutter slapped suddenly into dough.

Yes, the people closest to you, people you loved and people that loved you in the most overwhelming, incredible way in return, will miss you dearly. Your death will forever have an impact on them, and they will see your ghost everywhere they turn.

However, you know full well that even with friends and family surrounding you, you can be alone as ever. You can be the loneliest person in the entire world; you can feel as if you are the only person on the planet.

But what you don’t understand, at this very moment, as you are standing on this roof, is that you are not alone in the way you think you are. You think you’re the kind of alone that means alone in a crowd of strangers, alone in a room full of people you’ve never even met.

You think no one cares that you are standing up here on this roof, waiting to die.

But the reality is that each and every single person beneath you on the streets and sidewalk right now are living and breathing, and if you jump, they will continue living and breathing, but in a vastly different way than before. They will be forever changed. The jogger, the mother, the young child, the couples, the homeless men and women-their lives will never be the same, because they will witness the ending of a life when they have already been so deeply taught that the beginning of a life is the most precious thing of all.

All these people form a web, an interconnected web, and you are at the very center of it. They surround you like insects, and you are the spider.

You can do what you wish right now. You can catch them or you can let them escape.

Whatever your choice may be, a spider in a web surrounded by insects is never alone. It is connected to them by billions and billions of threads.

You are not alone. You are the furthest thing from it at this very moment.

So step back from the roof now.

Turn around and climb back through the window.

Shut it. Roll down the curtain.

Breathe.