Within seconds, she was falling. Her feet had almost reached the rung, but it was already snapping. They say you can do something a hundred times, and on the one hundred and first, things can go wrong. She had climbed this ladder more than a hundred times, but today, a muggy rainy day in October, the rung wasn’t able to uphold itself.
It reached its breaking point.
She stared up at me, while I looked down at her. The moment before she fell, I knew it was going to happen. She looked up at me. Feeling helpless and alone, her eyes yearned for safety and reassurance as she reached for the void above. She looked into my eyes. She did not glance at the yellow rimmed glasses, or the splotchy blue paint around them. She looked into the center of my eyes. She looked for as many second as she could before she fell.
She came here every day. This was the only place she could go. She came mostly at night, except for the days when she couldn’t make it out of her house. The moment she dreaded every day was going home. Within its weary walls of the beaten down house were memories of lonely nights and shattered glass, never removed, left to be crushed by her father's heavy boots.
The pungent scent of alcohol riddled the house, seeping into carpets and floor boards, and cracks in the walls.
I felt bad letting her fall, but what could I do? I am only a set of eyes peering over this wasteland. She lives in the valley, and my advantage is that I can see everything. Pasted to this billboard, I can see beyond the desolate land and look into the city of lights, twinkling and infusing the sky with a bright orange yellow tint. The valley of ashes gives the city of lights an even brighter radiance.
She wanted to reach the lights. She gazed at it from my balcony every night. She wished it could come to her, or she could find a foolproof way to break the wall between her and it’s promising glow. She saw a plethora of opportunity there. And I truly thought she would find a way to get there. Until one day, while stepping down the ladder she had climbed and descended so many times before, she fell endlessly, farther even than she realized was possible.
I can never fall. For the rest of my days, I will watch over this land. Both lands. And watch girls like her, full of hope, with longing for a better life, climb the ladder and stand on my front balcony. They will climb until they fail, or until they succeed. But who knows whether they can escape.  I am lucky. I stay still. The hope the people have is false, and I never want that. Sometimes I have sympathy for those who fall, especially her. This girl had more hope than the rest. And she deserved it more. She didn’t deserve her family who didn’t care what she did, yet resisted her attempts at freedom. She didn’t deserve it.
And so she fell. And no one could save her. The breaking point happens when it happens.