Yellow Roses

Reading Sundays, interesting story:
I felt like a beer and went down to buy it at the store. It was a warm night, with a fresh wind. The atmosphere was calm. The boy in the store was happy, yesterday his son was born. I stayed there to drink my beer. The neighbor from the top apartment came down and arrived at the store. He wore shorts that were cute. Suddenly there was a noise like a shock or explosion and we left, fearful, to see what happened. The neighbor of the seventh-level apartment had been pulled from the roof of the building.

Mario, the suicidal neighbor, was a depressed guy. He spent months without almost leaving his apartment. He worked from his apartment as a computer on the internet, so his isolation became worse. The guy seemed to hate everyone; Every kind gesture I tried with him was received as if it were an assault. For some reason I did not hate him or pity him, he was a sick guy who probably had no cure.

I was not surprised that he dumped himself, but he did survive. When we arrived with the neighbor to where he had fallen we saw him complain, but he breathed normally and because of the pain he fainted moments later. He had an exposed fracture of the tibia and fibula in his left leg. His right hand had also been broken. But he was alive, in spite of himself. An ambulance took him and he never returned to the building. A woman came to take her things out with a moving truck a week later.

With the neighbor of the nice shorts we were talking in the store. She was also glad that the young shopkeeper was a father. Dalma was called. She was a woman in her thirties, with long black hair and pretty legs. I used to wear sandals to show well-groomed feet.

"People who are born and people who want to die," Dalma said suddenly.

-I feel sorry for the man. He could not die, he will be suffering, "I answered. Life played him again badly.

• Neither was very clever to say, did not choose a fail-safe method. I would have taken an arrangement with yellow roses to the funeral home.

-Why yellow roses?

-Just because I like them.

The shopkeeper and newly released father only listened. Apart from the surprise of the event, the only thing that mattered to him and what pleased him was his son, who had weighed seven and a half pounds and looked like him. We left the store. I told Dalma that nothing better than sex to forget death and she agreed. What he did not agree on was that sex was between us, to my bad luck.

When we got back to the building, I went up to the suicide's apartment. His door was open, I do not know if he left it that way or someone entered. I could not stand the curiosity and I entered. Everything was messy, but it was not dirty. There was no suicide note, no alcohol, no drugs. His laptop was off, I sat in an armchair in the living room and turned it on.

He carried a kind of diary in a Word document he had on his laptop desk. He related that he listened to voices, and that at times he seemed to live an alternate reality. The medication did not work, the schizophrenia was winning the battle. On one page I appeared, as the only imbecile who tried to be nice. He wrote with impeccable spelling and good writing, but it was not especially interesting to read, except for some details of the voices, as he did not hear them with his ear but he could hear them inside his head, but they were still very clear.

When I was getting bored of the suicide journal, I found a mention of Dalma. When she went to live in the building she gave him a vase to put flowers and he had considered it a noble gesture on his part. The vase was on the dining table, which was clean and with nothing else. There were three yellow roses in the vase. I took one, left the apartment, left it in front of Dalma's door and went to sleep.