Takeoff
The plane launches with the colors of twilight shimmering on its wings. Although I have ten days until the true beginning of my journey, this feels like the first leg. Only one person left to say goodbye to.
As the plane turns on the runway, I watch the clouds glide across my window. How does the sky always look so breathtaking? Everything on the ground is harsh and sharp, even the naked tree branches that grasp for the heavens. Yet meanwhile, above is an oil painting. Soft, rippling, untouchable forms framing a light, a pure source of sheer power that shouts out a blinding whiteness. A perfect thing.
And then we are moving, faster and harder against the ground. All the sharp things blur in the rush but the sky remains whole; the undying sources shines on, light bleeding through any weak spots in the clouds.
Now it is a race; we rise to meet the level of the perfect sun, the sun who prepares to rest. We soar up higher and higher, the sharp edges of civilization dropping away, but the sun is unreachable, unfathomably high. However much we sweat, he stands, he rests at the finish line, teasing us.
A clear line pulls out below: the edge of the water, the edge of the earth, the edge of... my home. The speed slows and we float over familiar places: Grant Park, Millennium Park, the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building, the Field Museum, Navy Pier. And I search for the relics of my childhood, and I see them, now stunted from high above, robbed of their previous grandeur and superiority: the diamond building, the pencil building, the castle building... but where is my beloved?
It is not until we pass over the city, until I strain my neck back to search that I find - the monster building. Without his night lights he is barely recognizable; he seems gruff and unsatisfied while shoulder to shoulder and surrounded by unimportance, by lower beings.
I smile at his familiar stubbornness, and my heart clenches. My mind quickly sketches the vision into my memory, and my eyes wave goodbye. Goodbye, Chicago.
Suddenly: Blue. Green-blue, emerald-shimmering desert of painted sand yawns out before us. Slight waves dimple the surface making it undulate to the horizon; it dances with no music needed but that of the sun setting. And the color, this brilliant color, fades and blushes with the tides, with the depths of its insides, never dying and never making up its mind.
Suddenly: Nothing. White blindness, suffocating, oh might we rise for a bit of air-
Breath-
We break through the rusted white and rise above... Nothing. White nothing, that fluffs and clumps below us, in uneven formation. Could this, this fragile thing that barely is could this be those soft rippling forms?
Another layer is broken through without a shudder or a whisper. Then another, and then a fourth- and the fourth is a creamy blanket. Now most all the blue of the water is gone, taken over by a different kind of dimpled desert - one of cotton.
The light then hushes, as that perfect source lays down. The white blanket turns in the dark to blue-gray mountain ranges, with their tips kissed by the pink snow of dusk, and the canyons in between left in the dark of night. The sky turns a quiet, secret purple, and my eye roves a terrain that has never existed until now, and that no man may ever walk. And that, perhaps, no one sees but me.
As the plane turns on the runway, I watch the clouds glide across my window. How does the sky always look so breathtaking? Everything on the ground is harsh and sharp, even the naked tree branches that grasp for the heavens. Yet meanwhile, above is an oil painting. Soft, rippling, untouchable forms framing a light, a pure source of sheer power that shouts out a blinding whiteness. A perfect thing.
And then we are moving, faster and harder against the ground. All the sharp things blur in the rush but the sky remains whole; the undying sources shines on, light bleeding through any weak spots in the clouds.
Now it is a race; we rise to meet the level of the perfect sun, the sun who prepares to rest. We soar up higher and higher, the sharp edges of civilization dropping away, but the sun is unreachable, unfathomably high. However much we sweat, he stands, he rests at the finish line, teasing us.
A clear line pulls out below: the edge of the water, the edge of the earth, the edge of... my home. The speed slows and we float over familiar places: Grant Park, Millennium Park, the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building, the Field Museum, Navy Pier. And I search for the relics of my childhood, and I see them, now stunted from high above, robbed of their previous grandeur and superiority: the diamond building, the pencil building, the castle building... but where is my beloved?
It is not until we pass over the city, until I strain my neck back to search that I find - the monster building. Without his night lights he is barely recognizable; he seems gruff and unsatisfied while shoulder to shoulder and surrounded by unimportance, by lower beings.
I smile at his familiar stubbornness, and my heart clenches. My mind quickly sketches the vision into my memory, and my eyes wave goodbye. Goodbye, Chicago.
Suddenly: Blue. Green-blue, emerald-shimmering desert of painted sand yawns out before us. Slight waves dimple the surface making it undulate to the horizon; it dances with no music needed but that of the sun setting. And the color, this brilliant color, fades and blushes with the tides, with the depths of its insides, never dying and never making up its mind.
Suddenly: Nothing. White blindness, suffocating, oh might we rise for a bit of air-
Breath-
We break through the rusted white and rise above... Nothing. White nothing, that fluffs and clumps below us, in uneven formation. Could this, this fragile thing that barely is could this be those soft rippling forms?
Another layer is broken through without a shudder or a whisper. Then another, and then a fourth- and the fourth is a creamy blanket. Now most all the blue of the water is gone, taken over by a different kind of dimpled desert - one of cotton.
The light then hushes, as that perfect source lays down. The white blanket turns in the dark to blue-gray mountain ranges, with their tips kissed by the pink snow of dusk, and the canyons in between left in the dark of night. The sky turns a quiet, secret purple, and my eye roves a terrain that has never existed until now, and that no man may ever walk. And that, perhaps, no one sees but me.