Live my own life

That day, I had probably been standing at the edge of that bridge for over 2 hours already. Just do it already, just jump. I kept repeating that to myself over and over and over, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to do it, I had already made up my mind to do it, so why... why was I hesitating so much? Was I scared? Did I want to keep living that badly? I didn't know. I hated myself so much, for being such a coward. "I feel... I feel like s**t" I said quietly to myself as I walked towards the riverbank. I sat there trying to think, but my mind had become a complete mess. I just didn't want to deal with living anymore. The pain had just become too much to bear, I just wanted to feel free, to be able to laugh and smile like I used to, but that just wasn't possible, not anymore. So my only solution was to leave the world behind, but I couldn't even bring myself to do it. I was just too weak and I hated myself for that. I had just started going home when I heard a familiar voice from behind me,"Oh, so you're just going to run away just like you always do? How pathetic." I looked around and saw someone. He was too far away for me to make out how his face looked, but his voice, it sounded so familiar, like I had heard it somewhere before. I don't know why, but I had a really bad feeling about this person. He was just standing there staring at me, then he began to walk towards me. "All you do is run away. Why is that? What are you always so afraid of? "He continued as he kept getting closer. "Oh please, what would you know about my li..." I froze mid-sentence. He had finally gotten close enough for me to see his face and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. It was me! Right then, at that very moment, there was another me standing right in front of me. My brain couldn't understand what was happening. For a moment, I thought I really had jumped, and I was already dead, having some postmortal out-of-body experience or something. But no, this was real, I was real and this person who looked exactly like me was real. For the first time in a month, I felt something, something other than all the pain I had inside. I felt fear. I was scared, really really really scared. So many thoughts crossed my mind. Who was this person? Where did he come from? Why did he look just like me? What was he going to do to me? All these thoughts kept going through my mind, I felt so overwhelmed. "Who...who the hell are you?" I said to him, I let out an audible quiver. He smiled "What are you talking about? I'm you, obviously." I took a step back, my legs felt weak, like they could give out at any second. "That's impossible. There's no way you're me. This has to be some kind of trick." "A trick?" he said, tilting his head like the idea genuinely amused him. "Look at my face, Alex. Look at my hands. Do I look like a trick to you?" Hearing him say my name did something to me, it made my chest tighten in a way I couldn't explain. I hadn't told him my name. I hadn't said a single word about who I was, and yet he said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he had always known it because it was his name too. "How do you know my name," I asked, barely above a whisper. "Because it's mine too," he said. "I told you already. I'm you." I wanted to run. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me to turn around and get as far away from him as I could, but my feet stayed planted right where they were. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was curiosity, maybe some small part of me just wanted answers, but I stayed. "That's not possible," I said again, mostly to convince myself. "People don't just have copies of themselves walking around. This isn't a movie." He shrugged, and the gesture looked so familiar it made my skin crawl, because it was my gesture, the exact way I shrugged when I didn't know what else to say. "I don't have all the answers either, if that makes you feel any better. I know I look like you. I know I sound like you. I know things about you that I have no explanation for, like the fact that you were about to jump off that bridge before you lost your nerve." My throat went dry. "How could you possibly know that?" "I told you, I don't fully understand it myself," he said, and for the first time his voice lost some of its mocking edge. He almost sounded tired, the way I felt tired all the time. "All I know is I woke up somewhere I didn't recognize a few hours ago, and the only thing in my head was you. Your memories, your thoughts, everything. It was like someone poured your entire life into me and then just left me there to figure out what to do with it." I stared at him, unsure if I should believe a single word coming out of his mouth. "That still doesn't explain why you exist. People don't just appear out of nowhere." He was quiet for a moment, his eyes drifting toward the water like he was searching for the right words somewhere out there. "I think," he said slowly, "I was born out of regret." "What do you mean, regret?" "I mean exactly what I said." He finally looked back at me. "Somewhere in you, there's this regret, this... this weight you've been carrying around, and I think that's what made me. I don't know how, I don't know why, but every time I try to think about where I came from, that's the only word that keeps coming back. Regret." I felt something twist inside my chest, something I hadn't let myself feel in a long time. "Regret about what?" "I don't know," he admitted, and there was something almost desperate in the way he said it, like it frustrated him not to have the answer. "I wish I could tell you exactly, give you some neat explanation that makes all of this make sense, but I can't. I just know it's there. It's the reason I'm standing here instead of you being alone on that bridge." "That doesn't make any sense," I said, my voice cracking slightly. "None of this makes any sense." "Tell me about it," he said, and to my surprise, he let out a short, humorless laugh. "I've had a few hours to sit with this and I still don't get it either. All I know is that I remember standing at the edge of that bridge with you, feeling everything you were feeling, and something about it felt wrong. Not wrong like it shouldn't happen, wrong like... like it already had, somehow, and I was the leftover piece of whatever came after." I didn't respond right away. I just stood there staring at him, at this person who wore my face and spoke with my voice but carried something in his expression that I hadn't seen in my own reflection for a very long time. Concern. Confusion. Something that almost looked like fear, but not the kind of fear I felt. His fear looked more like the fear of not understanding, while mine was the fear of understanding too much. "So you're telling me," I finally said, "that you're some kind of... I don't know, byproduct, of me almost..." I couldn't finish the sentence. "Maybe," he said quietly. "I don't have a better word for it. I wish I did." We stood there in silence for a while, the sound of the river filling the space between us. I studied his face, searching for some sign that this was a joke, a hallucination, anything that made more sense than the reality standing in front of me. But there was nothing. Just him, looking as lost as I felt, waiting for me to say something, anything, that might help either of us understand what was happening. "I don't know what to do with this," I finally said. "Neither do I," he replied. "But I don't think either of us is going anywhere until we figure it out."