flight by aeroplane (vol. 1 of “living in a paradox”)

As you fly in your aeroplane, you look down at the face of our planet and you see how humanity has scarred it; we’ve chiseled roads into its crust; made forests deserts; painted the blue oceans brown and green until you have to convince yourself they’re not massive patches of dirt; turned earth’s natural givens into progress, coal into flame, oil into fuel, wind into energy. And squinting you see the mountains and hills, the only curvature in a view of geometric squares and lines, because even in it’s beauty they are trapped within the confinement of our perfectly straight farm roads. And it appears from this height as if the cars are in a mechanical loop, gliding effortlessly across dusty highways. Houses, skyscrapers, offices; brown, silver, gray. Forests and oceans living in the remaining room on our planet, not yet touched by the hand of industrialization, rather, human life. And as I peer through my double paned window down below, I picture myself, and what it would be like if I was put right on mother earth’s face like dropping the hanging yellow man on Google Maps onto earth’s satellite. And my chest concaves as my hearts quickens as my breath shallows as my eyebrows pinches...because imagining myself in that ‘2D’ realm forces me to believe I am just another creation of humanity, another pawn born to live in it’s creation; to drive on long lines of highways that I cannot exit, to follow the expectation of marriage, to settle in a town which takes up a minor fraction of the world, to do nothing but carry out a routine everyday that consists of wasting time. To effectively escape the physical planet, to be flown out of existence, to be in the perspective of an alien, to look down on our creations and existing format is a dream. One of those dreams that are so relieving and impossible that when you wake up you want to punish your brain for introducing your mind to a new addiction so strong you’ve developed a self-induced torture mechanism. The beautiful thing is, it isn’t a dream, it’s real; in an aeroplane you’ve disappeared off of the face of the earth; your feet don’t touch humanities habitat; your weight does not bruise earth’s outer skin; you have no effect.

You. Are. Not. There. Yet. You. See.

This is a real life example of proof that you can exist when you don’t...