From my window seat, I watched the propeller break the thickness of cloud that had momentarily embraced our aircraft. When we first took off, and the plane’s nose brazenly lifted off the runway, I was overwhelmed with a sense of humanity’s arrogance. How could we think our feeble hands and numb minds could clumsily meld metal and plastic, enabling us to invade the night sky like this?
Yet I was flying. As we gained altitude, I lost my sense of perspective, and the ground below me moved slower and slower. So slow that once this flimsy capsulation of man’s pride breached the cloud cover, all sense of motion ceased. I was left with the slightest queasiness in my stomach that betrayed movement.
I grabbed onto and sucked the nanoseconds after the breaching. For it was then that my existence was in the plane’s propeller (which whirled until its edges became tickling feathers or splayed paintbrushes) and in the crescent moon (which peered, bemused, at the oddity of the flying humans) and in the clouds beneath the flying craft (which alluded to the rising and falling chest of a loved-one under a down comforter).
Although I did not see us move, the crescent soon passed from my view, and the blanket-cloud was slowly pulled aside, revealing a landscape of what appeared to be illuminated bubble wrap. Each bubble had its own electric light bulb, and they just begging to be popped, to have their light spewed across the city blocks, dazzling locals and tourists alike. But the plane clamored evermore upward, and soon the bubble wrap was transformed into a myriad of diverse seed beads, all glued upon charcoal asphalt and begging my fingers to touch their texture.
And how I wanted to run my finger tips between their ridges and feel their round tops on my palm. But I had to let them go, for I was flying from
But in truth, I didn’t know where home was.
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