anon

Sam thought about suicide at the height of some seven miles, cruising with cloud and thick framed glass. Not his suicide; no, not directly, Sam was thinking about the sixteen or so ex of his sibling, the littlest sibling, the one who called him five minutes after the close to six ones his semi-dead then girlfriend took to text him the news: "killing myself, love you". Immediately, it wasn't too upsetting. They didn't tell the middle one, no, not directly but there was enough silence for Joss to find out, to play it down with the naive cruelty an easier life grants. Later on, Sam and Zach would sit with the fog of joint or four and talk it out like:

"Well Zach, you have to decide now. You have to decide if you can commit to this girl still."
"I don't like her anymore Sam. I hate her, she scares me. But if I go, I think she'll do it. I think she'll just do it and she'd do it to spite me because she cares for me and hates herself."
"Listen, her spite isn't your worry. Her life isn't yours but if you want to intwine them then just hear this out, if you do want that weight, that heavy burden of another's fate, you can't shrug it off. This girl is marching to a funeral, with or without you. You're going to kill this girl, she's sick and, worse, in love and you've already killed this girl and you're going to be killing her again with every step you take, every movement is agony to her, you're killing her again and again just by living and when you're carrying that pain, the pain of another who loves and hates you, it'll be digging it's long nails to hang on and hate you all the more, bleeding out your own life for theirs. Pippa's dead Zach, these people never lived to begin with, and now, now, it's just down to you to decide what time we hold the wake."

It was bullshit really, more of a private stoners game than a serious speaking of death, but they both enjoyed it, the veil of smoke and irony enough to give a hazed distance to the real gnawing issue: Pippa is going to die, will die soon likely and may already have died in the time it took for Sam to leave the plane. Sam, a man who lived with the absurd notion of constant audience even when he should assume loneliness (going so far, at the age of twenty, to tell presumably empty rooms to stop watching him, only, of course, when no one else was looking), was not overly dismayed by the thought of Pippa dying, but rather bored and somewhat interested in the underlying concept. He bore her no ill-will, simply, he found it a good opportunity to waste time between reading and watching clouds, the idea itself engaging his uncommon belief that that all people were certain to die; Pippa, he thought, was more certain than most but still he found her desire to rush into it bizarre. Often, even now, Sam would think of death, think of the small metal surface between his feet and open air, fantasise about it opening like a hatch or -- disappearing, evaporating with the rainwater and him, weightless now, cloaked in blanket and pirouetting down great blue tumbles, dancing to the rush of sky, grooving through cauliflower clouds and sunbeams, spinning and kicking for the terraced doll's houses below; bowing in a shin first squish for terra firma. Sam's intent however was agnostic to the concept, the imagery simply amused him. He could not imagine then why someone would be willing to enact it when the picture was as equally fine. Pippa likely would have similar thoughts, she even once imagined a similar miraculous fall, but Sam was unsure as to how these would not be sufficient. Surely she was not stupid enough to get so little out of dreaming? Suicide as an act was too wisely selfish for Sam to call her that. The paradox, the seemingly intelligent choice of finite end over ceaseless dreaming,  would have continued in Sam's mind if not for the calming scenery around him: the sky a stuck seafoam ocean of coiling air,the cabin inside cosily capsuled to the languid expanse --  all moving still to the sun but in all ways still moving, always bleeding unnoticed speed, all of it hurtling in such great stupor, the previous days worth of distance now just valued at pockets of second. All this, and more, was so huge on Sam's mind that he felt unable to stay awake further. Pippa was going to die, and in fact, just some five minutes after Sam had closed his eyes, put a serrated blade through her neck, leaving no note. No note not, as Joss suggested, because she had no signal; her reasons for dying were left unclear to her even alive, as arbitrary as any excuse she had for moving. Pippa was always going to die, had perhaps always died, every day had been a death for her in some light; rather instead then she defied her living death in the last, grasped vitality and steak knife, her single bloody baptising being only to exit as randomly as she came in.