Airplane Thoughts
I've always revelled in being up in the air. A part of me always thinks it was the way I was meant to see the world. Not from a car, down a well-worn highway, but from the sky. It makes me want to dive into the air, to feel it under my ...wings? and stoop and strike like a hawk at nothing. To play in the air, to look at the way the land ripples and melts into itself. To watch the way the water spills down mountains and the snow sprinkles the tops of hills. Something in my bones sings watching the clouds become so three-dimensional. Like something soft and touchable instead of the canopy of the sky. Something in me wants to raise my voice to the sun as I watch it set at eye-level, its bright red and orange spilling over the horizon as the sky darkens. I watch for the first stars to come out, and always make a wish. I watch the marvel of the land and the sunset and the mountains and the clouds like people watch a film, all my attention focused until night descends truly and my eyes cannot see anything more than garish lights maiming that perfect velvet of the ground. The people around me drink and chat, they're contained within this little metal tube of space. They watch their phones and their laptops, they look inward. When I look around i'm one of the few looking OUT. And I dont understand who could NOT. The sight always makes me smile like a madman all the while. The earth. The land. The world. Watching it stretch out before me, so solid and ancient and forgiving. So quiet and yet so indomitable despite the way we've attempted. But even so, you can watch roads conform to the ripples of hills, watch the way farms are carefully constructed on suitable land, look at the pattern of where cities are set. We cannot tame this earth despite our attempts. Looking at it from the sky, you really appreciate it. Great miles of land lie with no mark, no track, no building visible. It makes me smile, i love to watch the world that is so perfect and untouched by our hands. Admittedly the machine that allows me to do this is the height of human gall. To believe we can master the skies. Perhaps I feel in myself something that belongs in the sky. I have no fear in an aeroplane. If we fall, then we fall, and I die screaming to meet the world below me. Strange for someone so terribly afraid of heights to be unafraid of death in the sky, but there it is. For some reason, I always feel as though something will hold me up. The memory of wings stretches the muscles on my back. I know I had wings in a former life. Once upon a time I made love to the sky, I felt its caress, moved with it and rode it. I know if we fall I will fall like a stone, but better that than to never know the sensation of flight.