Hold the Sky

If I could have kissed the sky, I would have done it. There was a purple haze in the air, but Jimi Hendrix had nothing to do with my slack-jawed admiration. I looked at the sky, really looked at it for the first time in months. Rain was falling and to be honest I don't know if I fell in love again at that moment. Clouds like horses' manes, that curl of spray refracted against the sun when waves break on the shore.

That is perhaps what did me in. Staring through a plate glass window in the middle of the country, weary from a workday, and the ocean was breaking over my head. The pull of tides on the heart is a mysterious thing in the heartland when you don't have a liquid horizon as frame of reference. God knows I truly miss it sometimes. The steely bluish-purple sky, painted with curls of clouds that sang of the sea so vibrantly I forgot where I was.

Is it odd to fall in love with the sky? Perhaps this love is misguided. It is the sea that could be said to be my mistress, if I was so inclined to have one. Perhaps this explains my confusion and dislocation sometimes when I watch the sky or view the prairie. Alike in their vastness, different in their manifestations. Sky and grass have not the same gravitational effect on the salt in my blood.

I often ask myself if I should worry about tidal effects, how I feel the waves in my blood even being thousands of miles from the coast of my upbringing. In a curious inversion, the sky becomes that which holds me on the earth. The gauzy curls adorning the sky reminded me so much of the froth and spume on breakers that I was rendered speechless.

I'm rambling, aren't I? I should stop. Maybe. God, where am I now that I don't have the tide as anchor?

Don't be alarmed by my apparent drift. I'm not. I cannot be after the revelation I had when the sky caught up to me that day. File under "Things I Know About Myself": I can appreciate beauty without the imperative to possess that beauty. This is important.

What I know of the sky is that I do not want to possess it. To possess such a thing is to assume too much responsibility for that which I cannot control. What I know is this: I wish to  live under the sky, to coexist with it, and to bask in the glow of its beauty. I have no need to hold it anywhere but in my heart.