Frank had a lot of time to think while he was falling. How long he wasn’t exactly sure, but it had certainly been a few hours since his jump. He was now in pitch black darkness, the pinhole of light that had marked the opening of the hole he had jumped into had been swallowed up by the darkness about an hour into his journey. Though there was still air to breathe and to resist his fall, the whistling of the air caused by his body plummeting was so monotone that his brain had essentially shut it off in his head completely. So he was in total sensory deprivation and thus had a lot of time to think.

At first he thought about why he had jumped in the first place. He recalled that suicidal people who jump from bridges, canyons and the like will mostly immediately regret their decision moments from taking the plunge, and spend their remaining moments on earth lamenting their poor judgement. Frank wasn’t one of those folks, he realized, because it took hours to come to the conclusion that he shouldn’t have done what he did. Once it was clear that the hole had no bottom, no end in sight to his fall and to his life, the absurdity of death became as clear as the absurdity of life. In this state of falling in total blackness and silence, he was essentially dead already, he thought, and he took some time to process this and realize that he didn’t care much for death either. So with that decided, he didn’t have much else to think about as he had spent the last few weeks of his old life coming to terms with everything he could already. So after a while he was bored, then tired, then sleepy, then asleep. He dreamed he was a fish in an aquarium, aimlessly swimming laps around his tiny world.

He woke some time later with a start, not sure what had caused one of the strangest sensations he had ever felt in his life. There had been a sudden lurch in his stomach, a pull not unlike cresting a loop on a roller coaster, where it had seemed like the one constant force in his life (gravity) had for a moment been called into question. This lurch had jolted him awake, and it took several seconds for him to come to and realize he was still falling. He felt intense terror after coming to, but this only lasted a few moments before the tedium of the fall returned to him.

When he tried to get his bearings, he realized that he had somehow flipped upside down in his sleep and was now falling head first down the hole. He considered attempting to flip over again, as now blood was rushing to his head and he felt uncomfortable, but was afraid of that adjustment pushing him out of alignment with the hole and smashing into the side of it, which would certainly maim or kill him at this velocity. With his newfound desire to live (or at least not to die), he wanted to avoid this, though he considered it a strong possibility even if he tried his best since he could not see the sides of the hole at all.

He was getting quite hungry now, and briefly considered what he would do if he became certain he would die of starvation. The desire to avoid discomfort and pain is the first reason he chose the hole as a method of ending his life in the first place (the second reason was to not leave a body for his family to discover or have to identify), so this was a serious concern to him. Aside from trying to smash himself into the walls of the hole, he did not have any way to end this suffering. But this option seemed quite unpleasant, and he knew this decision could be made much later, so on he drifted through the blackness of the hole.

More time passed, and Frank continued to think. Why was this journey seemingly infinite? He had certainly expected a quick end to existence after his decision to jump. Perhaps he was dead already. But this was impossible; despite his sensory deprivation, the world felt quite real to him. He felt his body: the usual creaks and aches and pains of a sixty-something man were still coming through. His mind was still preoccupied with thoughts of his life, there was no clarity, serenity or Nirvana. No, this was not a death, he was sure of it. But certainly the hole represented a geometric impossibility. The Earth should not have space available to sustain a fall for this long. He began attempting to calculate the distance he had fallen, but without a sense of how much time had passed this was impossible. Scenarios of gravity wells, alternate dimensions, alien interventions and godlike machinations began permeating his consciousness, which did a very good job of distracting him from his ever-growing hunger and thirst. When at last Frank had expended any reasonable possibilities for how his situation made any sense, he happened to tilt his head upwards in the direction he was falling and noticed the light.

It is not clear when the light had appeared, but Frank suspected it was some time before he had noticed it. It looked suspiciously like the entrance to the hole had looked before the darkness swallowed it whole, a pinhole of white light radiating from the darkness like a beacon to him. He appeared to be headed straight for it, which was convenient because Frank was still terrified of his subtle movements throwing himself off course. Christian iconography often describes the ascent to heaven to be a “light at the end of the tunnel”. Frank was never a real believer in any religion, but being American he was fully saturated in the mythologies of Christ in his youth and thus felt the hints of Faith growing in his psyche. He felt so drawn to the light, so excited by the possibility of anything taking him away from the darkness that he reached his hands out in a superman pose, attempting to will himself there faster. After a few minutes his arms hurt and he retracted them, feeling quite silly.

But was the light growing? Was he actually headed towards it, or was it just a fixture of the landscape, not unlike the darkness? Yes, he was so sure it was getting closer. But his obsession with staring at the light was causing him to question himself. It is hard to discern subtle changes in any object that is constantly being monitored, so he decided to try and shut his eyes for a few minutes and then open them again to see if the light had changed its size. Before he closed them he briefly considered what would happen if he reopened his eyes to find the light had disappeared; but this possibility was too horrifying to take seriously and thus he willed his lids closed for as long as he could stand. Never a man to be particularly responsible, he accidentally fell asleep again within a few seconds.

He awoke again with a jolt. “The light!”, He exclaimed aloud, feeling silly again as there was nobody for miles that could hear him or cared to. He looked up and there it was: same pin of light, but significantly larger, now grown to a sphere roughly a quarter of the size that the sun in the sky should be. But now something else was happening to him, something he had felt a few hours prior but could no longer ignore: he was slowing down.

The feeling of slowdown was very subtle, and Frank was initially not sure it was actually happening since he had no visual point of reference to use. But hours spent without the ability to see, or any other stimuli affecting the senses made his internal gyroscope very acute. And there it was: a sense of slowing. It was very gradual but also quite noticeable. Frank became worried he would not reach the light, that he would eventually slow to a complete halt, or worse yet begin another fall back in the opposite direction, doomed to spend the rest of his life as a helpless pendulum. If this happened, he thought, he would certainly try and reorient himself in such a way that he would make contact with the side of the hole. But in a strange realization he considered the idea that there was no side to this hole, that instead of falling through a tunnel he was instead drifting through infinity, with nowhere to go in any direction. Again this thought was too troubling to fully consider without a total loss of hope. Frank had never truly lost hope, even when he had decided to end his life. Hope just was not strong enough a force to convince him not to jump.

At some point the light from above (though he originally thought of the direction of the light as below, the feeling of slowing had convinced him that this was now above him) had grown to a point where the walls of the hole were lit sufficiently for Frank to understand his surroundings slightly better. He could suddenly discern walls on all sides, and the hole was revealed to be a very perfect cylinder through which he was plummeting upwards through space. The diameter of the hole was surprisingly small, maybe about 20 feet, and Frank felt the impossibility of his situation stronger than ever. How had he not impacted the walls at some point during his fall? Was it this narrow the entire way down and up? Or did he somehow thread this needle by angling himself unconsciously toward the light? Any minor shift in his body he noticed himself drift slightly toward one of the sides, and he suddenly became very afraid. He held as still as he could and tried his best to stay centered while approaching what seemed like the end of his journey.

By now the light above him was quite large, but not perfectly cylindrical as he had previously thought. No, there was a small indentation in the circle of light, which was now blinding him with its intensity. Suddenly he perceived why: Rushing past him, again appearing at some point without him noticing, was a ladder on the side of the hole, rushing past him so fast it looked like a solid plank of steel. But the light was quite bright in the hole now, and he was instantly convinced that it was a ladder, built by some unknown party to assist travelers through this nightmarish journey.

Frank had never experienced a pivotal moment in his life before now. There were many defining moments of his existence, from experiences at school, to graduation and entering the workforce, to his marriage and later divorce, to his decision to jump into the hole through which he was now falling. But all of these events in his life had been part of the churn of existence, and usually resolved themselves over the course of days, weeks or months. He had never in his life had to make a truly split second decision, aside from maybe a few moments while driving on the highway that someone had pulled dangerously in front of him, but those were largely resolved by pure animal instinct and reflexes. Never had he been confronted with a challenge like grasping the ladder, and he experienced full minutes of frozen panic at the thought of what he was going to have to do. Luckily the slowing of his body took much longer than he expected, and he had about a full half an hour to come to terms with this and mentally prepare himself.

As he started to slow down to reasonable speeds, he could all of a sudden discern the individual rungs of the ladder, which had previously looked like a steel blur. The rungs of the ladder rushing by made an optical illusion similar to the effect of staring at car wheels on the freeway: it looked like the rungs were slowly moving downwards, like an escalator at the mall. Eventually this pattern stopped and the illusion ceased, and it became clear that the time was now or never. Frank, now very able to control his ascent after quite a bit of practice, slightly reoriented himself and moved to within three feet of the ladder, still rushing by at speeds that would certainly break his arms or worse if he tried to grasp them. He took a deep breath and concentrated as hard as he could.

When Frank hit the apex of his ascent, his stomach gave out again. There was a feeling of total weightlessness that washed over his entire body. He could not tell if time had slowed, but it sure felt like it had. He was so caught up in this feeling that he almost forgot to grab the ladder, but at possibly the last moment, after falling about a foot back down into the blackness, his arms shot out and grabbed a rung of the ladder and held on for dear life. His body, still three or so feet away from the ladder, wrenched forward and painfully smacked into the lower rungs. The wind was knocked out of Frank and he almost let go, but he managed to regain his composure and held on tight. He was safe!

But his feeling of relief turned again to terror as he tilted his head up to see the distance he had to climb. His fall had not taken him all the way up, instead the entrance (exit?) to the hole was still quite far above him. He estimated maybe a thousand feet between him and whatever the other side may be. Frank was still experiencing hunger and thirst, but at least he had gotten plenty of sleep on his journey, so the fear of needing to attempt a base camp on the side of the hole seemed to be unjustified. He made sure he had a decent footing and began the long ascent upwards.

Frank had never climbed a ladder that was not attached to a bunk bed before, and found it much harder to do than it looked. He had not seriously exercised his upper body in many years and thus had to rely on his legs as the primary source of locomotion. Climbing the ladder this far was not unlike climbing the stairwell of a skyscraper, and after a hundred or so rungs he felt fully exhausted and unable to continue. This felt very ironic to Frank; he had made it this far and finally had been given an opportunity to do something besides wait for fate to decide his future, and had utterly failed this arduous test. He was nearly ready to let go and begin another trip through the abyss, but there was certainly no ladder on the other side of the hole and he knew he would be resigned to a fate of starvation in total blackness. This did not appeal to Frank, so his force of will began to push his legs ever upward.

After a few hours of agony, Frank sprawled out over the top of the hole. Panting heavily, he thought that this was perhaps the most important moment of his life. He had made it! Where he had made it to, he had no idea. His eyes were still adjusting to the daylight, as he had spent what felt like several days in total blackness, so he could not see any of his surroundings. He could not hear much either, other than some wind rushing past his ears. He felt grass underneath him, grass that was damp and uncomfortable but real and tangible and therefore better than anything back down in the hole.

Frank’s eyes slowly adjusted to his surroundings. He could now hear birds chirping and waves crashing on a shore, and looking out for the first time with clear eyes he could see a dense tropical forest. Frank saw now that he was on a small island, one with maybe a few thousand feet of space in all directions before ending abruptly in ocean currents. It was a paradise, one Frank may have enjoyed more if he weren’t so hungry and thirsty. He began to wander the small island, peering through the dense grove for sustenance or civilization, but found neither. After about an hour he headed for the shore and sat down on the beach. He took off his shoes and socks and felt the sand between his toes. He was not sure what was to come. He was already forgetting his life before this, images of the other side were slipping away. This island was not home to him, not yet, but it was where he was at the moment.