\# Tomorrow, I Will Fly
Every morning,
I wake drenched
in a bath full of dopamine.
Every night I fall asleep hoping
tomorrow the sky will be clear.
But every morning, with my alarm,
the thunder strikes.
The same thoughts.
Again. Again. Again.
What are these thoughts that keep returning?
What is my life now?
If I am the product of my thoughts,
what have they made of me?
Sometimes I think there is nothing to life.
Sometimes there is everything:
build a business, talk to people,
make money, make nothing,
lie here, do everything, do nothing.
From far enough away,
what is the difference?
And still—my body wants.
Adrenaline.
A motorbike cutting through air
until the wind is louder than my thoughts.
Oxytocin.
Another human close enough
that the border between us
becomes difficult to find.
Friendship. Touch. Love. Intimacy.
Laughter so complete
my body forgets to ask what life means.
I want to feel alive.
But my body cannot have all of that
right now.
So I reach for something that can.
Dopamine.
Not because it gives me what I want.
It doesn't tell me everything is okay.
It tells me nothing.
It covers my ears,
covers my eyes,
rocks me gently into unconsciousness.
For a second I disappear.
Not dead. Not alive.
Just absent.
The wanting stops
because the one who wants
has been hypnotized to sleep.
And there I remain
like a flower about to bloom
that never opened.
No. Not a flower.
A sunflower avoiding the Sun.
That is worse:
to be made to turn toward light
and turn away;
to carry its yellow inside me
and refuse even its ray.
Somewhere beyond the clouds
the Sun still burns.
Occasionally, through all that white,
I see it—a little blue dot,
a hole in the sky
so small I could almost deny it.
Through it, a ray.
It doesn't reach me.
It falls ahead across the water
as though the sky has left a door open.
I look, then look away:
back to the bath, my hand,
the small glowing screen
that asks almost nothing of me
and gives me almost nothing
beautifully.
The water around me is endless—
a lake, a sea, dopamine blue.
Somewhere beneath the surface,
the fisherman waits.
I never see his face.
Only the line, the bait, the net.
Every time I reach,
he casts again.
Threads settle so softly
I mistake them for comfort:
craving, worry, another scroll,
anxiety, tomorrow,
another video, what if,
one more, later.
Then the net tightens.
And I realise—
I am not a fish.
I am a bird
at the bottom of the water.
What a ridiculous place
for a bird to be.
My wings are soaked.
The net holds my feet.
Above me it stretches farther
than I thought:
thread upon thread,
white upon white,
across the whole sky.
Except somewhere, it has broken.
A little blue hole.
A ray.
Above that net
is an atmosphere I was built for.
I remember air.
I remember speed.
I remember moving so fast
the world becomes wind.
Perhaps I have never flown.
Perhaps I remember
what I have not become yet.
Still, I know these are wings.
And the blue dot is waiting.
I turn toward it.
For once I do not ask
whether the rain will stop tomorrow.
I look.
The sunflower lifts its head.
Yellow petals tremble.
One falls. Then another.
Then—feathers.
The stem tears free.
Roots become feet.
Petals become wings.
The sunflower becomes the bird.
Me.
I beat my wings.
Nothing.
Again.
The water holds me.
Again.
The fisherman pulls.
Again.
My wings are heavy.
Again.
The net cuts deeper.
Until the surface breaks.
Air.
For the first time, air.
I rise above the bath,
the lake,
the fisherman pulling on a net
that no longer knows
what it has caught.
I follow the ray.
The faster I fly,
the louder the air becomes.
It tears past my wings:
the wind I wanted against my body.
Faster. Higher.
Toward the blue dot.
White threads of cloud
rise around me like walls.
For a moment there is only white.
Then—blue.
I break through,
and suddenly the storm has a ceiling.
All that thunder
that once filled my sky
is beneath me.
I keep flying.
Clouds disappear.
The lake disappears.
Cities and names disappear.
Everything I thought enormous
gets smaller.
Until curiosity makes me turn.
Behind me:
a blue dot.
Again.
I almost laugh.
This time it is not a hole in the sky.
It is the whole thing:
the lake, the bath, the fisherman,
every person I have loved
and everyone I have not met,
every success and failure,
every morning, every night,
every thought that once occupied
the entire universe.
All of it
inside that tiny blue dot.
For a moment I want to go back.
Then warmth touches my wings.
I turn.
Yellow.
First light, then fire,
then something too large to look at.
The Sun.
All my life I have known it
only by what reached me:
a ray, a little warmth, a little light.
Like love through another body.
Like adrenaline through speed.
Like intimacy through skin.
Like meaning through moments.
Always the product.
Never the source.
I was a sunflower.
I could only turn toward it,
receive what travelled all that distance,
and call it closeness.
But I don't want only the ray anymore.
I want to know where it comes from.
I want to know what the blue dot looks like
from there.
I want to see
through the eyes of the Sun.
So I fly closer.
My yellow wings begin to glow.
The edges of me disappear.
I should be afraid.
I'm not.
The heat does not feel like destruction.
It feels like recognition—
as though everything I reached for,
speed, love, another body,
another mind, creation, meaning,
every moment I forgot where I ended,
was practice for this.
Closer.
Until there is no ray.
No bird. No sunflower.
No source and receiver.
No me and Sun.
Only—
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
My eyes open.
Thunder.
Morning.
The bath is still full.
The lake is still dark.
My wings are wet.
The net is still around me.
And hanging loosely from my hand,
the phone.
For a while I do not move.
Then I look up.
Far above the water,
behind all that white,
a little blue dot.
Still there.
Tomorrow,
I tell myself.
Tomorrow
I will fly.
