Flying at night is such a foreign sensation. It's normal and pleasing to hear the attendant ask us to pay attention to the safety procedures we need to know while on board. There always seems to be a collective restraint not to snicker because they know and we know that we are not going to pay attention. It's like a little party of knowing.
But the lights. Night flying. It's so weird and oddly tangible as we take off. The ground recedes too quickly for my brain. So quickly that the tiny buildings directly below (as we make a U-turn so the right side is falling out the thick window) appear like little toy houses that you could easily pluck from the Earth with your giant, clumsy fingers. The building would moan as its concrete roots were ripped out of the ground; shards of debris falling haphazardly back to where gravity beckons where the Earth opens in a great maw of chunky rock and pipes. But the giant you is oblivious. The ruin you have caused is too small for you to register. Not like you care.
The world is so tiny now...and so much larger. The night lights twinkle in the distance as they fade from your human "naked eye" sight. And the closer ones make the Earth swell and calmly state their diameters of glow, swathing only a small part of the ground for nocturnal people. But there are so many of them.
At first, the shadowy forms of clouds hovering under you freak you out. You think that the lights are trembling on their own; soon to be snuffed out for some reason that scares you for a nanosecond, a millisecond, a second. And then you remember the sun will be met with your side of the Earth again, and everything is alright. But it's just clouds. So it was stupid to think of that in the first place, and you don't think of it again. The thought process was drowned out immediately after that fleeting moment by other more important subjects in your brain. Such as when you will be able to use your "portable electronics" or when you will get to wherever you're going...
Delays to plan for, things to eat, seeing people you love...
And out the window, the lights and all of their miniature halos fade and become softer. There's a smoothness to them now that you are father away. You can't stop looking, especially without good conversation of a companion beside you, and you try to imagine yourself down there. It's hard to though because all you can see are where the lights are and where they are not. So you become detached and you wonder...
"That's not my planet. That's not Earth. Where are all of the woods, the rivers, the lakes?" And then it dawns on you. Where the lights are not, of course. That is where they are. The beauty-marks of the Earth, which are still partially untapped by humanity. Polluted waters and withering trees that can be laughably called "green"; as if these resources were enough to clean our humanly messes anymore.
A wobbly butter-colored line... As if drawn by a young child with an unstable hand, leads to far off destinations.
A road at night.
Lit up by lights.
-HM
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