i r i d e s c e n t

i. azure

the softest kiss of the sky

LUNA

I could almost touch the sky. Only an oval of glass separated my ink-stained fingers from the blue beyond, a window smudged with the prints of another, smaller hand- someone else who had nearly embraced infinity. And I was so close to the sky.

Everything was normal, until it was extraordinary.

A soft smile danced across my chapped lips and tired features. This was happening. It was really happening. It wasn't a passing daydream that dissolved with the dew in the late hours of the warm South Carolina mornings at home, or an ephemeral wish pushed to the farthest corner of my mind until it was forgotten, moved out to make space for the many other important and yet trivial matters of everyday. No, this was real.

The plane hummed with anticipation.

Hope and fear like little birds inside my chest dug into my heart with the sharp claws of apprehension, yet somehow sang all the same, a melody that I think left my insides filled with light. I was happy, almost. Almost used to seem to me the saddest word in the whole language, a way to express what could have been and nearly was, if only. But this almost was hopeful. This almost meant soon. It was a beginning instead of an untimely end. And almost happy was the closest I'd been to happiness in a long time.

Almost. Afternoon light pouring into the cold cabin, turning the sleeping profile of the man beside me to gold.

To an average observer, nothing would appear out of the ordinary: just a tall, skinny girl curled up in the window seat of a Southwest Airlines jet, a book held tenderly in her arms, earbuds dangling from her neck. A more astute person would notice the way the girl took extra pains to avoid poking the professional-looking businessman sitting beside her with her long limbs in the cramped row, or the way she would periodically tuck the pale blonde tendrils of her wispy side-swept bangs behind her ear, gazing out the window to see the patchwork pattern of the farmlands below. A paranoid observer would probably point out something along the lines of oh my goodness, she's surrounded by the sky on all sides, and the only thing keeping her from plummeting to her death is a light-weight, pressurized aluminum can hurtling west at about 500 miles per hour (planes scared me a bit). And no outside person could see the effervescent swirl of emotions fizzing through my veins like colorful bubbles, popping and rising to the surface at random. Fear and excitement. Happiness and nervousness. After all, I was flying for the first time, following the sun to the west. California.

But I think the happiness outweighed my fear.

I peered into the window again, its small oval frame offering me a taste of the sky. It was the purest, softest blue I had ever seen, feathered here and there with gossamer clouds, whose vaporous forms seemed more illusion than reality. If dreams were tangible things that we could inhale for inspiration, I decided, this is what they would look like. It was so beautiful- I wanted to breathe it and live in it and paint it on the inside of my eyelids so I could see it every time I closed my eyes.

A sigh. Quiet. I turned. He looked like he was dreaming.

And so, through the hours, over mountains and rivers and deserts, the plane flew on. We waited, still but at the same time moving at break-neck speed toward summer, our time away from time.

The rustling of the woman's magazine, her red lips quirked in an amused half smile as she read the editorials. The coughing man in the lurid Hawaiian print shirt across the narrow aisle, opening a bag of pretzels offered earlier by a sleepy flight attendant. The snoring mother and the little child with the Spiderman sneakers gleefully kicking the seat in front of him. The pieces of the sky and the light and the constant hum.