Everything Looks Better From Far Away

Author : shams khan

Ayesha had always loved the view from her apartment balcony.

From the tenth floor, the city stretched like a glowing canvas—streets glittering with headlights, rooftops layered like uneven puzzle pieces, and crowds moving below like restless shadows. From up here, everything looked orderly, even beautiful.

But when she stepped onto those same streets, the beauty dissolved into noise—honking cars, impatient vendors, sweaty crowds pressing against one another. The city, up close, was messy and unforgiving. From far away, it was poetry.

She often wondered if life was the same way.

At twenty-five, Ayesha was a painter who hadn’t touched a brush in almost a year. Her canvases sat in the corner of her small apartment, stacked like silent witnesses to dreams she had abandoned. Once, she had believed art could be her life. She had studied colors like languages, shadows like secrets, and brushstrokes like breaths. But her last exhibition, the one she had poured her soul into, had failed spectacularly. The gallery was nearly empty, the reviews cold, the sales nonexistent.

“Talent is beautiful,” her uncle had said kindly, “but talent doesn’t pay rent.”

So Ayesha folded her dreams, tucked them into a corner of her heart, and accepted a clerical job in a gray office. She traded colors for spreadsheets, passion for paychecks. Every morning, she wore dull clothes, sipped lukewarm tea, and pretended she was fine.

But at night, she returned to her balcony. She leaned over the railing, watching the city soften into glowing lines and blurred silhouettes, and wondered: *Maybe my dreams still look beautiful from a distance.*

One evening, as the sun dipped into the horizon, she spotted a boy on the street below. His clothes were worn, his hair uncombed, but his hands moved with purpose. He knelt on the pavement, chalk in hand, sketching wide, uneven circles across the gray cement. Cars swerved around him, pedestrians frowned, vendors shouted, but the boy didn’t flinch. He kept drawing—circles, stars, spirals—until the dull street looked like a galaxy.

From above, Ayesha could see what no one else could: the chaos of the street had become a masterpiece under the boy’s small hands.

She smiled, and for the first time in months, something stirred inside her.

That night, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. The boy had nothing—no canvas, no studio, not even safety from the cars that nearly brushed his chalk-dusted arms—yet he created. He didn’t care who watched or whether anyone applauded. He didn’t even care that the rain might wash it all away. He just wanted to draw.

Ayesha looked at her corner of abandoned canvases and felt shame press against her chest. She had given up because of silence, because of failure, because the world hadn’t applauded. But maybe the boy had already learned what she had forgotten: that art was not about recognition. It was about breathing life into something that didn’t exist before.

The next day at work, her office felt heavier than ever. Numbers blurred, emails felt meaningless, and she caught herself doodling spirals on the margins of her notepad. That evening, she went straight to the balcony again, searching the street.

The boy was there. Drawing, again. His hands moved quickly, leaving trails of white chalk that transformed the pavement into planets. But today, people noticed. A child paused to look. A woman slowed down, smiled faintly, and dropped a coin at his feet. For a moment, the boy’s galaxy connected strangers.

Ayesha felt tears sting her eyes. She had been standing too close to her own failures, suffocated by their weight. Up close, she saw only rejection, imperfections, and disappointment. But distance—like the view from her balcony—showed her something different. Her failure wasn’t the end; it was a single, messy stroke in a bigger painting.

That night, she pulled the dust-covered easel into the moonlight. Her hands trembled as she picked up a brush. At first, the lines came out uneven, clumsy. Her colors didn’t blend the way she wanted. But as the minutes turned into hours, she stopped thinking about perfection. She painted the boy on the street, his chalk circles glowing like stars. She painted the city around him, loud and chaotic, yet softened by distance into something almost beautiful.

By dawn, she collapsed into her chair, exhausted but alive.

The painting wasn’t perfect. But it was hers. And it breathed.

In the weeks that followed, Ayesha began painting again. Small pieces at first—sketches, colors, fragments of dreams—but each one carried more of her heart. Slowly, her apartment filled with new canvases. Her colleagues noticed the spark returning to her eyes, though they didn’t know why. And Ayesha herself felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time: wholeness.

Months later, she passed by the same street where she had first seen the boy. The chalk drawings were gone, washed away by time and rain. But Ayesha didn’t feel sad. She understood now. Art didn’t have to last forever to matter. Its power was in the moment it was created, in the life it breathed into the one who made it—and into the ones who saw it.

Standing there, she whispered to herself, “Everything really does look better from far away. But sometimes, you have to step closer to make it real.”

And with that, she went home, ready to paint her next galaxy.