Caught Between The Sky And An Empty Place
Remember when I made this to be a travel blog, and halfway through stopped traveling? Good times.
That’s not true anymore. Today I rode a plane and traveled out of the state of Texas for the first time in over a year. If you’re really invested in keeping up with all this, my last travel entry was The Most Beautiful Twilight (Not The Movie).
I love traveling by airplane. There’s something so whimsical about it. Think about it: for generations, millennia back, humans have told stories of beings who can fly; people who can travel from one end of the world to the other on a whim. Now we can do it, and it takes the same amount of brain capacity to comprehend that as it does to comprehend walking across the street. Our ancestors would think we’re the coolest thing since the wheel.
I had to wake up at three in the morning, though, which put a damper on things for a bit. But something happened as soon as I was buckled in the plane and watching us slowly slant towards the sky: a hole in my heart that I hadn’t realized was there suddenly filled. You don’t often realize that you love something until it is only given to you in small doses, and this is how I found out that I love running to another place with wild abandon.
The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, but in the sky I could see how it painted clouds blue and pink and orange. If I looked all the way up, the sky would deepen to black, and the barrier between me and outer space was never thinner. I was engulfed by sky. Now that I have landed in the Rockies, I am embraced by ground.
Recently, funnily enough, people have laughed at my love of the world. They wish they had my optimism. They wish the world had kept them innocent, too. When I tell them that I have indeed suffered like the rest of us, they don’t always believe it. What funny people. My trying to make a plane ride into a work of art is because I have seen the ugly in the world, and instead of dwelling on it I wish to consider its various colors and hugs. Call it my coping mechanism.
The people of the Rockies are constantly surrounded by natural things trying to kill them: predators, weather, disasters both in and outside of their control. Yet they choose to write songs about the mountains. Airplanes are tin cans of death, but they put us closer to space and take us to beautiful places. Maybe I’m melodramatic. Maybe I just took my first plane ride in over a year and am riding high on endorphins. But I think there’s something so sweet about how our first reaction to pain is trying to find something happy. When we realize we miss something, instead of crying, we save up all our dollars to find it again. Those faced with death sing songs. I hung between the sky and space, and I’m talking about the clouds.
But everybody’s allowed to be deep and poetic on an airplane. That’s why they supply earplugs.