*

Five miles high, listening to silence. The stars are so much closer here, and when you turn away from the world below and look up, space leaps out--there is nothing else. It makes me dizzy. I can't do it for more than a moment, or everything starts to drift away, and I can't afford to lose myself for too long.

I love this point of view. I love tracing the dark spaces between the rifts and rill of tiny lights below, scattered like bright souls from the hand of a careless goddess, and wondering what they hide. Mountains, or lakes, or desert, perhaps. They remind me about the constellations that are formed from the darkness between the stars, the ones that nobody ever sees because they don't think about them. But I watch them with interest.

There is something beguiling about those empty spaces below, with no lights, no people, no cars or engines or jarring rhythms. As always, I feel the strongest urge to drop, shoot straight into the middle of the darkness and see where I find myself when the morning splits the world open. I wonder if anyone would look up and think it was a shooting star coming to rest.

But as compelling as the unknown is, there is work to be done among the patterns of light that shimmer so far below. It is a choice to be made, every day, every night. And for now, at least, it is a choice I will make again.

And I know that as soon as I drop back down into the obscene, chaotic mess that hides behind those lights at my feet, no matter the strength of the reasons, I will wish I'd chosen differently.

Someday I will.