**WATTYS 2022 WINNER** Seventeen-year-old Evelyn Werth is on an endless flight from hell. She's the only person onboard Aloha Airways Flight 1333 who's caught in a 28-minute time loop.
During each cycle, four things happen:
1. The Internet goes out...
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Still Loop 7
The flight attendants, Lydia and Cheyanne, approach me and face the bathroom door, right as it opens.
Meanwhile, Bryan and Mason are charging forward, rushing down the aisle in giant strides.
Then everything slows down, for a long moment. It's like what Evelyn was talking about a few loops ago. Where time gets bottlenecked, and slows to a slither. It's as if my thoughts exist in a timeless plane all on their own, and my life comes into a startling focus. It's a moment of realization, where suddenly everything makes sense on some greater cosmic scale.
And as Mason and Bryan thunder down the aisle towards me as Jerry holds his blade, ready to strike, I realize that I had it all mixed up. These last few months, I had been looking at everything the wrong way.
I was always so afraid to fully acknowledge my illness. That somehow, saying the words and owning what it meant, would diminish me. Make me less, somehow. Chip away at all the things I previously thought of myself, whittle me down into something smaller. A shadow of myself.
But it didn't change me in any way.
Because I'm not just any one thing.
I'm not just a son, or a brother. I'm not just a smart boy with a scholarship, who spends his days trying to understand the great unanswerable mysteries of the solar system. And I'm definitely not just a teen battling a rare form of blood cancer.
I am many things.
I am full of multitudes. My life is full of multitudes.
And every day I'm alive is full of surprises, unexpected turns, and beautiful discoveries along the way. As long as I keep my eyes open to them.
Then I remember one of my mom's favorite quotes, by a man named Zig Ziglar. Life is an echo. What you send out, comes back. What you sow, you reap. What you give, you get. What you see in others, exists in you.
Then time speeds back up again as Bryan and Mason race towards us, storming the front of the plane. I watch them turn towards the open bathroom, their eyes locking on Jerry, standing in the doorway of the tiny airplane lavatory, clenching the blade in his hand.
Jerry settles, knees bent, in a fighting stance. But his eyes flash in desperation, mirroring a look I know well. Survival Mode. But little does he know, I've been living in seven loops of Survival Mode, and still another form of it for many months now.
He's not the only one fighting for his life.
But I have more fight in me. Because I'm fighting for everything, and everyone.
