Peculair Pointsettia #4

I like flying at night. I especially like flying at night when it’s not my shift. Most people are sleeping, trying to recover from the jet lag of a terrible/wonderful business trip, tired of trying to act like they know exactly what is going on, when most of the people around them are literally speaking a language they don’t understand. The other half are desperately trying to prepare themselves for the ordeal that the other passengers have already gone through. It is disconcerting, even for the CEO Egos that are aboard, to travel to a place where the familiar is rare.

Outside are the stars, you can see them best over the ocean. No light pollution, no civilization to distort them. Just the dark of the water underneath, and the lights of the wings trying to compete.

I told my father when I was little, that I was going to be an astronaut.

“Oh really? Why?”

“So I can go through the big clouds to visit heaven.”

“How will you know that you are there?”

I’ll see the angels with wings dancing on the clouds, Silly!”

My dad was quiet after that. When I was little I knew he was stumped by my logic; hindsight says, he was debating whether to tell me that heaven might not exactly BE, or even if there was, the angels might not be dancing. I can see him shrugging to himself, with the the image of the afterburn from the shuttle singeing their wings a bit.

Here I am flying, but it’s very different. No glory, I’m just a commodity, doing a job that a vending machine serves on the ground.

Once we get to Tokyo, I’ll be drowning in the artificial lights and deluge of neon signs. Passengers will de-board the plane, slurped up by the call of civilization.

Few will have looked outside, and seen the dark and light.