Random: Flying in Summer

         Darkness eats away at the faces of young men in the night, leaving only eyes hollowed out by pitted black shadow. Or something like that, anyway. The exact phrasing, as I'd written it several months prior, is lost. So too is the original meaning. Was it supposed to sound meaningful, proverbial, important, a portent--what is exactly a portent? But already it's hit me: I've leeched again and this time the style isn't so much sense as flavor and the flavor's rank. Which is, essentially, the problem.
         Well, that and the fact that Microsoft Word is double spacing my paragraphs, but that is quite obviously beside the point. (And, just as obviously, it isn't--but who's to know but me, you, and Erwin Rommel?) The point is this: I've always wanted to write a book. A good book. I mean, hell, anyone can write a book (unless they can't) but to write a good book, to write literature, to do that takes something extra, or at least a good dollop of luck. And therein lies the problem. To write a book like that you need talent, and skill, and quite possibly even experience too. I've really none of that at all. Maybe a bit of luck, but that's about it. And pizzazz. Enough of that to make your head hurt. But back to the problem: I can't write a good book. I want to, but deep down I know (or think, or feel, or fear) that I can't. Maybe I could start one, or a portion of one, but to write an entirely magnificent book from start to finish would be, for me, an impossibility.
         I'm bored. I finished two books today: The Protector's War and  Anasasi Boys. Both were pretty good, but depressingly short. I figure I'm still in for at least four hours of airplane ride, so unless the girl beside me finishes her book (it looks like some novel by that woman who wrote that other book with the brilliantly red blanket on a stark off-white cover) I'm hosed. I've only 48% of battery power remaining, too, and this is after dimming the computer screen to the point where white is gray and as milked over as an old man's blind eye.
         I think the thing I love most about flying is knowing that you shouldn't be doing it. I mean that in a general sense: people in general should have never started flying, and know it, and don't care. Mankind was never made for the sky; you can feel that in your bones the moment  the airplane jolts down the runway, and it is reaffirmed the moment that plane leaves the ground. Those wheels go up and suddenly you're not only just sitting in a plane, you're flying in a plane. More than that, though--you're hurtling along in that plane, in the air, screaming along at hundreds of miles an hour. And it's not just the plane that's moving that fast, but you are too. If you forgot about the plane for a moment, or just pretended it wasn't there, it'd only be you hurtling along through the air. You're never really sitting still on a plane, unless it's on the ground.
         Another thing I love about flying: the view. I love staring at the clouds, mostly because when you're at eye-level with them you can appreciate how beautifully illusionary they really are. Most people see clouds up in the sky and think: "Huh, what a pretty day" and move along. As pretty as a picture--Clouds flatten from the ground up, become just another smear in the scenery, and only if you make yourself realize what they really look like do you see them for what they are. They are mountains, or battleships, or deserts. They are impossibly round, and bulbous, and shapely. They crest up out of nothing, end abruptly, shape around and around on themselves, and they are alone, islands in a stream.
         If I had the book with me, I'd quote from it. The Mote in God's Eye. How did it go? The worlds we know are bubbles in an ocean (or a river?) and while we can hop from bubble to bubble, we have absolutely no idea what lies in between, or in the ocean, or the river, or the pond.  But trust me, the actual quotation is better. It was poetic, and philosophical, and weighty.
         The sun is setting behind us and throws a premature blush along the steel rivet wings. We are flying into night, which is a lot like flying into winter, and passing through autumn on the way there. Autumn is beautiful in Florida. I've always thought of myself as a child of autumn, ignoring the fact that February is still very much in the winter, or spring. But autumn is nostalgia, and quiet, and that soft, subtle longing for a taste of something else. It's like being young, and craving the taste of strawberry wine. The wine itself is bitter, but the song makes it sound beautiful. You want the idea of it, not it itself. And the nostalgia settles.
         I am a time traveler. I have jumped ahead in days, and stayed in others. Unlike common consensus would suggest, however, a time traveler cannot choose when it is they travel. Days they would want to draw out end quickly. Months of bliss sieve away in seconds; years of monotony and ache linger like old wounds. Today, for instance, is the same day I left Australia, over twenty hours ago. It was  Friday the Thirteenth when I left, and it is Friday the Thirteenth now, and it will be Friday the Thirteenth when I arrive at Orlando, to be driven back to a place I don't honestly think I can call home anymore. It was home before I left, but now it is just family. My home is back in Australia with Luke, or wherever he goes, or lost somewhere in my mind with memories and sensations of a distantly remembered dream. Some sensations, words, smiles, laughter--they jump at you, tangible and real, while others float just behind them, wistful and waiting for their turn to memory. I do not want to keep this day alive; I want it to end, and all others after it to end, to blur fast together until December, or until March, or June again when I can go home to Luke.
         The sun has hardly set, and already cities have begun to blink on. I like that too about flying; the bigness of everything, the darkness from the air, the pockets of civilization, brilliantly lit-up, speckled throughout the night.  My love for those lights is a matter of pride, and a matter of security. It is pride because this is what man has made, and it is security because what man has made is familiar to man, and what is familiar is safe.