Going insane. Jet lag. Going places.

Mostly you have to draw on modern experiences to describe the top of the clouds from an airplane window--they look like pillows, goose down! They look like spun cotton, cotton balls, cotton stuffing, cotton candy! Like looking down from a ski lift! Like a bed, a duvet, a comforter!

How far back can you go that the image will be universal? I think it's impossible. They look like scored clay ready to be attached with slip, silt and rain. They look like a very clean sheep's wool. They look like white hills and valleys; like an alien landscape, like crisscrossed scars on the moon lit from within. Like pale, aged skin, bunched and pulled translucent over blue veins. Like milk dropping into a bucket. Endless fields in monochrome; like if the kingdom of heaven was Kansas. When the sky opens up, the clouds become pearled archipelagos amidst the blue.

Thin purple clouds hang even higher over the head of the plane, pulling sunlight from below--do they look different as floor than ceiling, too? Some things are so old and transient I will never begin to grasp them because I am too new and temporary; and I'm glad, these kinds of things I never expected I would get anyway. Ever since I was a kid, I loved the line in The Sound of Music when the nuns say, How can you catch a cloud and pin it down? I am coming to terms with it, some things aren't meant for me to spend my whole life trying to figure out, they are just better to sit with and enjoy my time quietly. Still after 7 hours I imagine the plane runs continuously forever, until a round trip is more like a spiral.

To be honest I have never been on this long of a flight on my own before. It's so normal up here-- I mix a terrible airplane mimosa with flat white wine and Sunkist and type on my phone. Below us the shadow of a giant being stretches across the "ground" -- the extension of our bodies at 9:00 am on December 12 2024, a Boeing 767 to Newark.