It was once the tallest building in Chicago—part of a pair. 601 feet tall and someone is falling from the top of it. You think you know her. You recognize her. Brown lipstick. Peter Pan collar. Eyebrows that just don’t quit and hair that doesn’t quite match the rest of her features. But then again, neither does yours. Perhaps she was the original hipster? Perhaps to you, she’s someone more. A someone with a name.
Now her white blouse billows as she tumbles, limbs flailing like some broken marionette or one of the NSYNC dolls you got at Christmas.
Maybe she’s the one who got it for you? But she seems like someone who would stop you at FAO Schwarz and say you’re too good to be playing with dolls. “You’re better than that,” she might say, wanting you to know that your life could be more than dolls and plastic kitchens.
But this is neither the time nor place to be thinking about that. You need to be worrying about her.
She’s important and suddenly seeing her fall is the most traumatizing thing you could imagine.
But you’re 11 and just want to go home. Forgetting about it feels like the best thing you could do right now even though this gutted feeling is living rent free in your mind.
If this wasn’t happening, you might be able to finish reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But you can’t. Not if this doesn’t happen.
Something needs to be broken before it can be put back together.
Your life needs to be broken.
It was silent for a hot minute but now wind and sound build up. You can’t go home. You can’t stop watching, and the crowd you didn’t see before, are all gathered by the vast windows, their iPhones raised, TikTok capturing every twist of her body—feeding it to the world, ready for consumption.
The fall is endless, a perfect mix of morbid fascination. A duet of something like this would be both fascinating and fucked up all at the same time. A viral video for sure.
You walk away from the building as if it’s part of your daily routine. The streets of the city stretch out before you, silent and empty, but your feet don’t feel like yours.
They feel borrowed as if someone else left them behind or lost them during a fall. Someone taller. Someone who might look at your feet with pure shock when they realize how little they are. As if each time they see your shoes is their first time…
You definitely know her. Maybe she is you but with height and a strange ability to be happy with doing the same thing every single day. It’s hard to tell.
The city, all glass and steel, feels hollow, like it’s too quiet to be real. The building from before rises behind you, a monolith, its sharp lines piercing the sky like a corporate dagger. You imagine it falling, piece by piece, crumbling, but it doesn’t. It stays frozen, looming. A building like this in another time and another space might. But this one won’t. It’s not important enough. Not significant to anyone but you and the woman who was falling.
You’re floating through the Loop now, the slick glass of skyscrapers reflecting your face back at you, but each time, you look a little more like her. An average life is closing in, creeping up on you with every step you take toward Roscoe Village—a place you’d never leave until you do. Eventually neat houses, quiet streets, Metra trains, and a 9-5 job might feel safe and not seem like a trap.
You worry that you might become her. Year by year, moment by moment. Falling out of a skyscraper and into mediocrity. She was “someone” who turned into“no one” and worked a gray job in a gray building with gray life.
The city blurs. You try to focus, but your mind blurs—finally Harry Potter and a Mountain Dew is waiting for you on a worn-out deck. You dive deep into The Goblet of Fire, and the part where Cedric dies happens and you realize this isn’t a children’s story anymore. It’s a nightmare in disguise, and you’re trapped again. A wizard war is coming, but it’s not magic anymore. It’s something darker, something unavoidable. Sharp parallels loom overhead. A creeping dread is hanging over you now, with the gnawing realization that things will never go back to what they were.
Life be like that sometimes.
The world continues to twist, and you’re home. But it’s not a home you recognize. Your parents are there, but they don’t see you. You say “hi,” but the word falls flat, swallowed by the silence. They’re too busy on their phones, making calls to someone who may or may not answer. You wonder if they even know you’re here and whether you’re real to them at all. You stand there for what feels like hours, waiting for someone to acknowledge your existence.
The silence presses in, heavy, suffocating.
Your eyes drift to the fridge. A birthday cake is in there, but it’s not going to be eaten. Not today. What is a birthday cake if it isn’t eaten on a birthday? You picture it sitting there in the dark, waiting, untouched. It feels… wrong.
A cake with no purpose.
Maybe it’s not a cake at all anymore. Maybe it’s something sadder. It will probably be eaten tomorrow, but it won’t be the same. The birthday would be over. It would be like eating a ghost.
You’re on your deck. Clouds sprawl above you, but it’s wrong. No noise like the world’s been paused. The Goblet of Fire stares back at you, the pages thick with dread. You sip Mountain Dew, but it tastes strange, metallic like you’re not really there.
This entire time you wonder if anything is real, including yourself.
I mean really, how old are you? Does this place even exist?
Your mind drifts back to the woman falling from the building. It’s on TV. She’s still falling, but now she looks like you. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Each year, you slip further into her shadow, closer to that safe, gray life that waits for you, like an inevitable tide pulling you under.
You try to shake it off, but you can’t.
The more you resist, the more you feel it—the weight of becoming someone who became no one. You want to be like Harry, lost in the darkness but on the edge of something huge. You could be someone that could change everything. But even Harry doesn’t get to end like that. Society has a way of ensuring that we all have a slow and sad bureaucratic death. Auror. Lawyer. Writer. Whatever.
Now you read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire every year on your birthday to remind yourself of the slow suffocation of growing older, of losing yourself piece by piece until you’re not even sure who you are. It keeps you from falling like someone else you know.
You close the book. The sky still empty, people still watching, and a birthday cake still waiting. You wonder if you will eat it, or if it will just sit there, forgotten, like a relic of something that was supposed to be. Like you and someone who wanted you to be better.
Your alarm goes off and everything fades.
Today you’re 34.