Jules could not remember the last time she'd been on her roof. In the five years she'd lived in the building, she could recall one or two starry nights filled with awkward community conversation and desperate contemplation. Just a week before, she'd told her son that his dreams that were probably actually memories of climbing up to the top of the building were dangerous and she hoped he'd stay closer to the ground in the future. Now she was there, in the place she'd forbade him to go, small wisps of her hair tickling her cheeks in the late night breeze. All around her, the city was still awake. There were long swaths of darkness, but small lights winked on and off in every direction she looked. From this vantage point, four stories up, she could see as far as the nearest skyscraper with views of nearby hills.

She'd woken in the middle of the night, the sound of the jungle suddenly missing from her nighttime environment. Instead, there was traffic and the creak of the floorboards above her and the gentle snoring of a man she hadn't seen in two weeks. Who she might not see again for another week. Fitting these meetings between everything else in her life, at times, seemed impossible. She felt that any moment spent with a single person was a moment she was missing out on important things with three other people. Waking up next to someone felt like a luxury she should have been enjoying, but she felt restless and confused. There was a longing, deep in her chest to float up and above everything she knew to get a better look at it all, to see the patterns and better arrange the things she cared about or was suddenly responsible for. So she climbed the stairs to the roof, hoping that the stars and the lights of San Francisco would provide some previously unseen perspective.

When the stars and the lights failed her, she looked to the tallest point of the roof--a small gabled roof plopped down on the edge of the otherwise flat building top. Having never visited the topmost apartment in her building, she could only guess that the unique feature had been added to give the penthouse a loft or vaulted ceilings. Or maybe it had been designed that way to make the building more inviting to passersby. To Jules, it was just another test of the abilities she'd inherited from the stranger in her head. After the embarrassing test of this particular climbing skill in Costa Rica that left her contemplating a graceful way to leave the ceiling without falling through the ceiling fan for nearly half an hour, she'd been reluctant to climb anything at all. This moment, however, felt right. Her flats were not built for climbing rooftops, but the new confidence in her movements helped her up all the same. When she stood at the point of that gable, she tilted her face up to the sky, looking hard for any streaks of light or bright green flashes that could give her a deep, cosmic understanding of just what exactly was happening.

The wind, previously calming and gentle, suddenly took great offense to this willful disregard for gravity, gusting hard against her. The shoes, which had only been a minor inconvenience just one short minute before, were now a massive detriment as she fought to keep her balance on that rooftop. The feeling of falling lasted both an eon and a nanosecond, making every firing synapse inside her an individual wildfire as her new reflexes and instincts took over. Though she dangled from the edge of that roof for just a moment, she could see through a large pane of glass as her body swung in front of it, that the penthouse did, in fact, have vaulted ceilings. Hoisting herself back up onto the sloped roof was easier than pulling herself out of bed, but she scrabbled up and over the roofing onto the familiar, flat surface where adrenaline and fear fought for dominance over her circulatory system.

Minutes later, when she was back in her bedroom, her fingers still shook as she unzipped her hoodie and shed herself of the clothing she'd thrown on before leaving the apartment. Careful not to wake Jason as she snaked her way back under his right arm, she let out a small, wavering breath against his clavicle and looked up at the bit of ceiling she could see from this position. She could not shake that moment of weightlessness from her mind. Based on all of her research, she knew that she could not fly. She could fall. Despite all of the fear currently making her fingertips go numb, there was something comforting about that fact. Falling was an inevitability, but it wasn't an ending anymore.