Note: A short travel memoir, or a diary entree, which was born while I was in a flight, coming back to the US from India in January 2016. The view of the white, fluffy bed of clouds resting in the ethereal depths of the sky, seeing them from so close from the window of the plane has always been a surreal experience, and the view which I was part of hungrily, ardently, inspired me to write the piece. 

A luminous speck of bounty stared at me as I stood, suspended, weightless, afloat in the wide, shallow air.

'Who are you? Diamond drops at the end of the sepia night, sifting your atoms, slipping through my tapered ends?' I asked, as my eager fingers longed to touch them, bite into them, dip into the vanilla sky.

'Don't touch us', the bits of light, tucked under the fluffy bed of clouds pleaded.

'Watch us, instead, lay brick over brick of pure, slanting light, skating forward, like white, ethereal shadows while you watch us diminish and dim into the darkness of your hollow-ribbed destinations...

My vessel stroked, side-slipping, as they walked and ran around, water to sky, in the whipped birdsong of the morning.

I looked at their ivory contours, flirting with, shimmering against our leaks, cracks and the failed architecture of our conceited silence. 

In a few hours, we would be back to the ground, dwell in our coveted caves, leaving these rare, lucent embers. The sky would wave us, mock our gorgeous, pitiless earthen songs, all of us running past the mills where a few bits of our rising selves, our phantom limbs would fumble, squirm...all that would be left of us would be the dust, the sliver of the sky, sifting through our bodies, our hungry, urban ashes.