Short Story of the Month: June

Bird's Eye View

By: F. Sarkis

It’s funny how from up there everything seemed so small, so meaningless, so fragile. How the tallest of buildings are but geometric shapes, fitting into each other, contoured by the streets.

You look down and all you see is shapes, shapes, shapes that don’t seem real; shapes which don’t seem to keep people inside them, people who have lives, who have issues, who suffer- but you can’t see them from up here, so they might as well not exist at all.

You feel detached from all the issues you have in your life, all the problems, all the mistakes, all the tangled affairs. You are just you, and, in that moment, everything is fine.

No emails, no messages, no phone calls, no nothing. Pure silence apart from the sound of the engine and the cry of a baby in the back.

You forget about the problems at work, the emails you haven’t answered, the phone calls you need to make, everything, just everything, because you convince yourself that you can’t do any of that right now, anything at all. All you can do is sit there, and wait for the plane to land, wait for the pause in your life to be over.

But you love the pause, because there are not many of those in life. Pausing life can be both infuriating and delightful.

You could be stressing about all the things you should be doing, all the time you are wasting, everything you could get done- but you chose not to. You chose to forget it all, to live in the moment right now, to focus on the family next to her, the cute baby with a cute little pout and the mother with the heartwarming smile.

Because everything’s fine.

There are no disappointments, no errors, no failures, no due dates, no nothing. Only you. You’re there, and that is what you wanted, what you needed- a minute of you, a minute of peace. A minute of sanity where your life is in fast-forward, but you’re on pause. And when you hit play, it’ll all come back to you again.

So you distract yourself with everything around you, you convince yourself that you can’t do anything but just that, because there is no wifi, no signal, no nothing.

​Everything’s fine.

​It’s your one and only moment of complete tranquility in almost a year, the only one where you don’t think about all you need to do because you physically can’t do anything about it- or maybe you can, but you just don’t want to.

​via: https://throughmyeyes608.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/birds-eye-view/