today, the sun came up seven hours early.
the plane was shaking. i don’t much like it when planes that i happen to be riding in shake.
quite impersonally, a man hands me a water in an in-flight plastic tumbler. one ice cube. that’s the first thing i noticed… the second thing i noticed was a nearly microscopic speck floating dangerously close to my one ice cube.
“i’d better get a closer look,” i thought to myself. “what if it were someone that was accidentally shrunk, like in honey, i shrunk the kids?”
for whatever reason, since i was a little kid, i’ve had the gift of empathy. i could always put myself in other’s shoes, and very eerily feel close to how they felt. at times, a great gift. others, a curse.
i recall watching honey, i shrunk the kids and understanding completely how those shrunken kids felt. just wanting to be noticed. needing someone to notice. before they were squashed by a tennis shoe, or perhaps crushed in the mandibles of a hungry cricket. or worse yet… sipped into oblivion while floating in some aloof schmuck’s in-flight beverage.
so i leaned in to check the speck. oh… just some dirt.
suddenly the plane stopped shaking.
and as i looked out the window, we slid unnoticed through the fading night.
chasing sunrise.
andrew slaton | blog 