Diamond

I got smaller and smaller, and as I did, I made a wonderful discovery. When I had just crossed over the line I would come to call VNE, or Visible to the Naked Eye, the world slowed down. Finally, time was no longer my enemy. I was free to frolic.

A stubborn weight was driven from my back. The donkey that had lived there for years grew earnest wings and lifted itself off and away and into the blue, which had now, after VNE, become even bluer, but I don't think that was really possible. I was light as air, which had now become my only food, my only need. When the world had finally become clear to me, beautifully seen, that's when I was truly invisible. By humans, the only seers that had ever seemed to matter. In the slowed-down world in which I could sleep between heartbeats, everything was clear, refracted and polished to diamonds. That's even what the air looked like.

The gleam meant I couldn't see much else, so I was, it's true, deprived of that pleasure that everyone who's ever flown in an airplane has known: the pleasure of finding your street, your house, from an utterly foreign vantage point. I had so wanted to see my street and my house—my life—from my new position, but I couldn't. Everything was too bright, and my little eyes weren't up to it.

I quickly reached the point where movement itself was impossible. This happened a few hours after VNE. Hours which would have been like years, perhaps, decades maybe, before. I couldn't move and I couldn't see, but the stillness pounded in me like a heart, my own heart having stopped beating almost completely by then. I had never been happier. I realized that I had never been happy. I was a diamond.