flying (excerpted 152111)

And on the plane I watched as the whole sky dimmed and everything became hazy, striated in blue, as though you could see the edge of the world dropping straight off and the only remnants were blue, blue, blue, just shades and shades of it, and then the beautiful white gleam of the moon over all. I'm sure some of it was the glass of the airplane window, but it was like living in a watercolour painting, except for the moon: the moon could have been cut out with lasers, it was so sharp and white. Like a wash of colour with a new silver coin placed on top. I was sitting behind the wing, so that even while the blue layers darkened and smeared all together into black and the moon rose too high to see out the tiny porthole, I could still see the reflection of the moon on the wings of the plane. Truly, very beautiful.

And I guess I saw the sprawl of open water and fields and then later, in the dark, the lights of major cities - I did fly over the East Coast - and they too were lovely, but in the face of that blue they can't hold a candle, can they?