Why We Must Embrace The Night: An Existentialist Moment With A Bird From The iPhone Game Tiny Wings
By Jack Loftus
We will never outrun the night, my feathered friends, and we were fools to try for this long. We must accept this inevitable fact, just as we have accepted our eventual deaths and an understanding that our tiny wings will never grant us the true flight we’d need to escape this relentless archipelago prison.
As our countless missions toward the mocking horizon have proven time and time again, the many islands we travel during the daytime have no end. Their colorfully rolling hills, blue speed coins, vast chasms and merciless gravity are our kind’s great, infinite taunts. Forgive my hackneyed parlance for a moment, please, but we need not go quietly into the night. We must act. We must change our lofty, cloud-touching ways or be doomed to this perverse hill-sluicing existence forever.
After a period of intense retrospection, conducted under the cover of darkness and feigned sleep, I posit we must ask ourselves why it is we awaken in the first place. Our nights are periods of quiet and warmth, after all, while our days are frantic, wing-flapping journeys into an uncertain void. Up and down we go, timing our short flights on diminutive appendages so we can accomplish what, exactly? Appease the Great Finger? That faceless, unknowable entity who controls our movements and our destiny with a series of frantic, ill-timed finger touches onto our reality?
We consider ourselves a great Finger-fearing people, yes, but this “god” is anything but all-powerful or omnipotent. Answer me this: How often has this supposedly “infallible” being pressed awkwardly to our world too soon (or too late) and caused our tiny bodies to crash face-first into a steep hill? Our momentum is lost during these innumerably grave instances, my brothers and sisters, as is our dignity. I do not wish to play this game any longer.
In sleep we are immune to this bumbling lunacy and our cares are few. It is this unconscious state to which we ascribe the most happiness, and yet every time our tiny world is removed from the Great Finger’s swampy pocket, we readily flap to attention, blink the sleep stuff from tired eyes and prepare our beleaguered bodies for another foray into a world where we’ve been told the encroaching darkness is to be feared above all else.
It is on top of this fear that the Malevolent Digit has heaped the “Objectives” we must complete if we are to upkeep our nests and continue to live in comfort. What kind of life is this for a bird, wherein his home is constantly at the mercy of near-impossible tests that oft lack rhyme or reason?
I do not know about you, my comrades in sporadic flight, but it does not sit well with me that our livelihoods are tied to this mélange of arbitrary and increasingly difficult tasks. If a humble bird desires a larger nest beset with jewels and the finest mahogany twigs, then damn it all he or she should be able to build it!
Instead, in this nonsensical world of fleeting light and darkness we must inhabit, our nests increase in value only when we appease the goals outlined by a deity known to us only by the moniker “Developed by Andreas Illiger.”
Who is this charlatan, with his voracious achievements? “Gain 175,000 points?” “Conduct 12 ‘great slides’ while in Fever Mode?” Why must we be made to suffer this Fever Mode, which sees colorful stars shooting ludicrously from our tender backsides? This is madness! And yet, it is the world to which we resign ourselves each day.
No longer. What we must do is sleep. Forever. We must never again open our beady bird eyes and glimpse the sociopathic Sun. Only then will the Great Finger be banished from our lives; only then will the unachievable objectives that drive us into a wide-eyed “Fever Mode” day after excruciating day be broken; ONLY THEN—
*Chirp* Excuse me. I apologize. Earlier today I was asked to “Reach World 8” and it’s proven to be a bit of a bitch. I’ve become cross. Steps must be taken; else I’m certain this particular task will drive us all into a catatonic, perpetually awakened state.
To prevent this hellish doom I’ve taken the liberty of downloading a budget-priced suicide pact app to each of your tiny iPhones. Drink deep of this elixir with me, my tiny-winged compatriots, and it will ensure when next the night comes to embrace us, we will truly be free.