Anyway, wherever you are, I hope you have a swift recovery... If you're in a hospital. I certainly hope you are! - Starling

hahahaa yeah no youre rihgt. i wont change my username

Perhaps nobody else wanted to be up at the middle of the night. I couldn't blame them.

The clouds were gray and the night was stormy, but through it all the plane stayed straight. We climbed up to the heavens and stayed there, staring at the clouds and the brief glances of clarity through holes in its blanket.

The world seemed so small, and yet so loomingly big.

Perhaps out of exhaustion, perhaps out of a morbid curiosity, I reached out to the window, as if to make contact with the clouds themselves.

As soon as my fingers reached the glass, a bolt of light shocked my vision and raced through my body. Everything felt blindingly hot and chillingly cold at the same time. I almost felt my heart stop at the sheer power that flooded through every part of my body.

For a minute, I could touch the sky.

And then,

I saw

the universe.

Just for a split second, galaxies and clusters, stars danced in my vision, tiny specks smaller than should have been possible to see. Beyond that...

nothing.

Just... nothing. The edge of the universe was so impossibly far, so immensely huge...

If I had looked at it for any longer than I did, I don't think my mind could've taken it.

It was terrifying, and it was astounding. It was cosmic and something I shouldn't be able to fathom, but for all its terror, all its vastness...

it was beautiful. The universe was beautiful, and I was too small to understand, but I could never forget how unfathomably gorgeous it was, light twinkling in wavelengths that I shouldn't have been able to see making the darkness shine, more precious than any gemstone.

The image was forever burned into my mind.

And as I fell, consciousness fading, the plane falling to pieces around me, I looked up at the sky and realized I wasn't alone.

And the universe loved you, I thought. The universe was kind, but the universe was not nice. It was beautiful in its unfairness, in its fear.

My skin burned with a pain that sparked and writhed under red, raised skin as I fell farther, and farther, only barely aware of the ground hurtling towards me.

For all the danger I was in, as I thought I was dying,

my eyes were only for the sky.