80/twenty

The June sun sets stubbornly at this height, “at 35,000 feet” floating east toward home. The cabin lights are low, no smoking and seat belt indicators glow like streetlamps down the rows. Everyone around me is asleep. The awkward posture of airline slumber consistent like a military protocol: mouths open, chins forward.

The setting has a quiet intimacy, a romantic calm. The sun has largely been put down, inaudibly exploding on to morning somewhere far away. The hues of the set mostly absorbed and refracted by the earth leave the sky an inky marine darkness. Another day surrendered to the inexorable invasion of time, aided treacherously by my eastward journey.

An urban dusting of light below reveals fields, streets, dark paths, neighborhoods and thoroughfares. A thousand little theatres, lamped stages. One cannot see people from this height, only possession and control of the land. It is vast in scale; accumulated ownerships like snowflakes blanket like snowfall.

New Delhi, India