The nearest building beckoned me, a white cross slicing the sky like a wound in flesh, a pale welcome to the foolhardy. Five feet to the ground might as well have been five hundred; the earth stretched wide. Up there, beside God, I could not be afraid. He was silent, watching with indifferent eyes as I leapt. No holy hand reached out to catch me as I tore through heaven’s thin skin. I expected too much and got only the soft grass below— a touch which would return me to my mother’s arms, to my first breath, in the hospital’s bright, sterile light, swaddled in blood and afterbirth. Between sky and ground, in that short moment of falling, the truth I had long denied came clear—God was never there. I had confused my mother’s arms for wings, her touch for the divine. Yes, because God could watch me jump from every church roof in the world and never once reach to catch me. But my mother, she would still answer the phone if I called.