The country of clouds

It never seizes to wonder, the flight. Up up and away! :D (Yes that's actually how my face looks like throughout the flight)
(The first time I flew early morning towards Leh, I couldn't restrain my glee. My hands clutched at the handle not with fear but with hope to tame down my excitement. I would strain my neck to see out of the window. I couldn't help but laugh out loud with helpless blameless happinesss pouring out through my being. Well, many delays and lay overs later, the same excitement grips me on every single flight still.)

Within moments you leave all that you have known. People shrink to impossible insignificance of small ants. Big imposing sky scrapers look like lego sets. As you peer down, you skip by distances so swiftly as if you have grown giant limbs and they are so far below that you can't feel them. Jumping over buildings and roads, my imaginary feet running with easy strides.

And then comes the best part of it all. The clouds. :D Passing and cutting through wispy ethereal things you quickly enter the country of clouds. This country requires no Visa, and has no western/asian bias for transit. Often early mornings, you unbuckle yourselves just as when you are gliding past lovely vast playgrounds of cotton. The pristine clouds are gilded with golden sunshine; the very first rays of the divine sun.

Often I have imagined to tug at my neighbour's hands to ask him/her to join me as I open the window and start running and jumping on those clouds. Jump from one cloud to another.. spend the evening sipping tea on a cloud while gazing at the horizon.


The same clouds, however, became villainously mercurial on our way back from Vietnam to Malaysia. It was dark and cloudy and when the stormy clouds made our aircraft fall substantially (my best guess, my ears registered getting fucked up real bad), all I could think was for the clouds to part and to let us in clear skies again. I imagined pushing clouds away with hands and peering in depths of the skies to see where was the next lightening coming.

Only if clouds ever allowed us that intimacy. sigh.