Mirrors

Josiah had been lost going on a week. The impending sense of doom loomed over him like a proverbial black cloud following a man of unbelievable bad luck, such as Josiah. He had ventured out on an excursion of the national forest on his own, for the first time, on behest of his friends who thought he was ready for the task. Tall trees and unturned rocks were all that were around him, and the rustling of leaves and faint breathing in the distance was for sure a wild animal, which paralyzed Josiah with even more fear. The half moon was the only light he had, but it was as dim as his hopes for survival in his own mind. As he looked up, he saw a barn owl perched in a tree, gazing at Josiah with bewilderment, as if he was looking in a mirror. It was out of place like he, and the cold, blank stare from the owl pierced through Josiah like a knife through a Thanksgiving turkey. The frayed, frayed ruffled wings were indicative of his clothing he was not yet able to change., the loneliness of being in unfamiliar territory, and the unknown plagued them both. They both were in purgatory, so to speak, and looking at each other as if they had the answers for one another. They had no concept of time, no idea how to escape, and no inkling what would happen next. Their lives paralleled, their fates have been unequivocally sealed, and the quicksand of time had run out on both of them. Or so it seemed, The mind is as delicate as fine china, and was it playing tricks on him, or was the end really near? Was the owl a figment of his imagination, or was it really lost like him? As he crumbled to the ground in exhaustion, so did the owl.

Josiah wakes up with tubes intubated in his arms and nostrils, as well as being hooked to a heart monitor, albeit faint, it was still beating. The taste of ice chips gave him little relief to his burned lips and solid foods were out of the question for the time being. Nurses and doctors rotate in and out of his room constantly, like they were being tagged into a tag team wrestling match, and everything was a blur. The TV was on, and he could hear, but the words were nondescript and sounded jumbled. He hasn't spoken a word, or uttered a sound. As he turned his head to the left, he saw that very same owl sitting on his window sill. He knew he had to be hallucinating, so he asked the nurse if she saw something on the sill, in which she replied she didn't. Josiah worked himself into a frenzy, compromising his already fragile mental state even more. The more he panicked, so did the owl. His heart rate went up, and he started to shake violently, and so did the owl. The crash cart came in and tried to revive Josiah as he went into shock and unconsciousness. With every shock with a defibrillator, Josiah's body jumped off the bed like a kid on a trampoline, and the owl followed suit by jumping as well. Then, suddenly the owl fell off the sill, and plummeted with the gratefulness of man slipping a banana peel to the ground below, and at that precise moment, Josiah flatlined. Josiah and the owl were one in the same: Two lost souls who mirrored each other in the final stages, as the world continues to turn, and life goes on.