Fly

Prose poem/vignette following a traveller's "heightened experience".

I brought books, but in the end I don’t touch a single one. My eyes are one with the glass.

We rise. We are sheathed in a mass of white fluff.
We are in a cloud. In it.

We pass through it, and I see a sprawling field of many more, sitting comfortably in their armchairs of oxygen, the sun painting the tops.

I stare and stare. The other passengers think I’m crazy. I don’t care.

I look down at the ground and try to guess how many miles I can see.

Huge trucks are scurrying aphids. Inside every one is a person, even smaller.

These tiny insect people driving the tiny insect cars, unaware that everything they are, everything that they’ve ever known, thought, done or been surrounded by, is tiny.

Over there. A mountain wrapped in a soft shawl made of white. It is not coloured white. It is white.

Trees. Hills. Entire canyons I could fit in my palm, huge oceans of trees and life – all at once. I gasp. I gasp at all this beauty.

The clouds caress the mountaintops. I imagine climbing to the very top and shouting a shout so loud it creates an everlasting echo that only the beauty can hear.
I am jealous of the clouds.

I keep on looking. The beauty is now interrupted by houses – rows and rows and rows all just the same.

I can’t supress my sigh.

The things I know become clear again as we land.

I step out of my brief state of immortality and become tiny once more.