Written In the Clouds

Prologue

The clouds.  Always a constant companion.  I would look up, and there they were, floating lazily above me, blocking the brilliant baby blue sky, and a hot yellow sun, shielding my eyes. 

I don't remember much of my childhood.  I should suspect most people don't.  Memories are weak, and easily forgotten should they hold no meaning.  But I always remembered looking up at the sky.  The sky was freedom.  That's what most people say the sky represents, and why shouldn't they?  It oozes a safe haven from the unforgiving, hard ground.  It promises light, floating, freedom, and the clouds were where you rested.  I always liked the clouds the most in the sky.  Sure, the blue of the sky was beautiful, and the sun was brilliant in every way, but there was something about clouds that made me want to gaze at them forever. 

I used to hear of fairy tales, where gods lived in those clouds, arguing and bickering among themselves over how the world should work.  I always wondered why they were so uptight when they got to spend their days on what must be the softest thing that was ever created. 

The greatest tale I heard came from my grandfather.  He once told me that if you looked up at the clouds enough, they would be able to see into your future, and tell it to you through pictures in the sky.  I would lay outside all day some summers, watching the clouds roll by.  I remember the notebook that I kept, where I wrote all the pictures I saw that day, and always tried to put the story together.   But it never did make sense.

Everything else about my childhood zipped and blurred past me.  I remember more from my high school years than any other grade.  My love of gazing up into the clouds from my younger years made me the ditsy girl of the class.  I have always been intelligent, but my inexplicable love of clouds made people think differently of me.  I was treated as an air headed idiot. 

I didn't have many friends.  That was my life.  I liked the world I had made on my own, and I had no intention of changing it just for the sake of a few human companions, who would inevitably leave me, anyways.  I didn't need friends.  I was happy the way I was, and saw no reason to change. 

I decided to become a writer.  I had the imagination for it, and after spending so much time reading, and staring at the clouds, it made perfect sense.  You didn't need friends to write.  You could spend your whole life alone and be perfectly content being friends with the characters you created. 

I wrote of everything and anything.  I wrote of mythical adventures, crippling mysteries, horror stories that would leave my own mind in a dark, scary place when I had finished writing it. I wrote of hope, freedom, family, and even romance.  Though I had never really needed it, nor wanted it, the idea of romance was something that I had a scientific curiosity of it.  Having never been in a situation of romance, I usually researched what love was like.  I read romance novels, delving into research about what love could mean. 

I eventually gave up.  I wrote the novel, and forgot about it.

Over the years, I became successful.  I would send the novels I had written years ago to a publishing company once every year., and continued to write.  I never wrote another romance novel.  That is, until I sent the only one I made to the publisher.