Between Timezones and What-Ifs ᯓ ✈︎ ⋆°☁︎

Somewhere between departure and arrival, my mind wandered, reminding me that everything feels smaller when you're above it — including your worries.

I swear the best place to overthink is 30,000 feet in the air.

No Wi-Fi, no notifications, just me, a window seat, and my playlist in the background like a movie score. I start off chill, half-looking out the window, and then suddenly my brain is like… how are clouds even real? Why am I floating through the sky in a metal tube with a bunch of strangers, all headed to completely different lives?

Something about being up there makes everything feel slower… like the world is paused and I’m watching it from the outside. It’s oddly peaceful. And kind of freaky. But mostly peaceful.

That’s when the spiral starts.

How is nature the way it is? Why are the clouds shaped like that? Soft and dramatic at the same time, like they were designed just to be stared at? I see why so many people love to lay in parks, look up, and see what figures they can imagine out of the clouds.

And it’s not just me up here. It’s dozens of strangers sitting inches apart, each with their own destination, their own reasons, their own thoughts spiraling in their heads too. I look around and wonder where they’re going, what they’re thinking about, who they miss. I will never know any of those answers, but I’m an empath, so I can’t help but wonder.

Then I look out again, and the sky looks… never-ending. Like it wasn’t meant to have borders. Like we’re flying through something bigger than we understand, something infinite, but not in a scary way.

From up here, the world doesn’t even look real — it looks like a model someone made out of cardboard and little plastic trees. The cars are just dots. The neighborhoods are neat little squares. You can’t see people at all. Everything just feels… small.

It reminds me of the ET ride at Universal Studios, that part where you’re flying over the little city and everything looks like blinking lights and toy houses. Like none of it really matters.

But the wild part is… it does matter.

To someone down there, that dot is their house. Their job. Their breakup. Their big day. Their favorite restaurant. Their childhood street. That’s what messes me up, how something that looks like nothing from up here means everything to someone down there.

And they probably don’t even realize they’re being watched from above by a girl eating airplane snacks and questioning the universe.

2 playlists I switched between on the plane (Spotify @listeninglaur)

It messes with your head.

Like… what actually matters when everything looks so tiny from up here? When you realize how big the world is, and how small your problems feel when you zoom out?

But even though it all looks like dots, each one is full of real people, living whole, complicated lives. People building things, laughing in cars, arguing over dinner, chasing dreams, making mistakes. None of it looks significant from the sky — but it is. To them, it’s everything.

And that’s the weird contradiction I keep circling back to:

how can something look so meaningless but actually mean so much?

Maybe we’re not supposed to have answers. Maybe the point is to sit in that feeling, that strange mix of awe, confusion, and weird comfort that only comes when you’re completely disconnected from the world you’re trying to make sense of.

So I just let it happen.

Let the thoughts drift in and out, the same way the clouds do. I didn’t try to force meaning or figure it all out. I just let myself be, in the sky, between timezones and what-ifs.

Maybe that’s the gift of moments like this. They don’t fix anything. They don’t give you a big answer or change your life in some dramatic way.

But they remind you: you’re part of something bigger.

And maybe it’s okay not to know what that “something” is just yet.

All I know is that for a little while, I got to float above it all, and that was enough. <3