009: To Kiss the Earth

If you fall far enough, you can kiss the Earth. You can be human. That is what mum told me. We sit on clouds and watch the brown and green and blue below, and think about what it might feel like to hold even a pinch of that world in our arms, to smell it and love it and know that we are part of it. It is in our thoughts and dreams, our talk and our laugh. It seeps into our very being, and we yearn for that world that we can only see. It is our destiny to watch but not touch, mum says. It is a painful privilege, and up here we will live on long after that world is gone. And still we yearn. We have seen the Earth; we know desire. And in our desire we take one last breath of crystalline air. We fly. We hurl ourselves off our clouds and fall in flickers of white, reaching for the brown and green and blue. If we fall far enough, we can kiss the Earth. But brown is dry and green is dark and blue is deep. We kiss the Earth and fear. Our white becomes muddy, becomes twisted, becomes drowned. It will never wash off. Soon we melt and are no more. We fell to kiss the Earth.