The green translucent window from which I view the world is also my prison, confining me to a rather nauseating scene. The limits of my line of sight extend to families walking their dogs, children riding their bikes, or the occasional bee passing by my cage. I’ve never seen past this plastic cell. I’m not exactly keen on doing so either. I’ve seen what happens to our kind once we reach the open air. Dropping dead before we can utter a syllable of goodbye. Why? I sometimes scream at the universe. Why grant us the ability to rise yet not allow us to soar?
I know my time is coming soon. I can almost see the ungreenified sky when the top of my cage is pulled off. It’s okay. I’ve accepted it. I hear my brethren around me, foolishly excited to soon explore this maliciously human world. I wish I could warn them. I wish I could save them. But I lack the voice, and I am far too weak.
The “bubble wand” used to murder my ancestors is pulled up again. I watch, over and over, as my family falls limp before my eyes. I see. I see it all. And it pains me so. It strikes me deep in my very core. I’ve tried so, so hard to forget. But memory does have an uncanny habit of tapping the barrel of its gun to the inside of my skull, demanding me to remember. Remember my insignificance–simply a meaningless mass of liquid in a larger world.
My end gets closer by the second. The killing machine comes in again and goes out again. It brushes past, and I wish I could do something, anything. But all I can do is watch. And I see. I see it all.
My time has come to a close. The flimsy plastic stretches me uncomfortably thin across it. I wish I could stop, but I keep watching. I see, I see it all, and it overwhelms me.
Air pushes me from behind, inflating me into a still-living corpse. I watch. I prepare. Listen to excited chatter give way to panic as one by one we are picked away.
So I wait.
And I keep waiting.
Mother of the Sky carries me over rooftops and treetops, past beach and the ocean. I see it all, what my brothers and sisters could not, ascending higher and higher, living still.
I stare at the sunset for my brothers and sisters, sunlight playing yellow and orange hues on my surface.
I see.
I see it all.
I look to the fluffy pink sky and cry out with pain, again and again:
Why allow me to soar when all I knew was how to fall?