Where Do They Go?

By the time I took my lunch break, my head was pounding from the effort of a morning spent choking back my responses to idiocy and incompetence. I stomped outside to my parking spot, got in, and unclenched my teeth long enough to put food between them, and then I clenched and clenched again, rage as masticating fuel, rage as my mealtime companion.

I thought I might doze into a nap, escape for a little while, but my mind would not obey. It fed me the little imaginary conversations that are always worse than the ones that actually happen. I sat in the seat and reacted again and again to phantom words, illusory slights, hypothetical losses of face. Finally, I leaned my head against the cool glass and counted my breaths. Almost time to go back inside.

And then I looked up. Up past the still-leafy branches into the blue sky, the blue that hurts the blue in my eyes, the blue that acts as canvas to the paint, the white paint of clouds in the high windiness.

The clouds were bunched and moving fast, swirling and shifting, like the corona of the sun, like lava splashing, making quick shapes, shapes like the outlines of nations, shapes like lions rampant, extending their ragged arms, morphing again and then peeling off…and the arms disappeared. Where do they go, these limbs of vapor, with their perpetual living movement? They are purest white but they pour forth and rise like the caramel bubbles crawling along the inner surface of a freshly pulled pint of Guinness. They never stop, and they never cease disappearing. I saw you, and you mattered to me, I think, staring up into the blue, and I realize that I must look insane from the outside, my eyes wide and searching, my hands up near my face, my mouth open a bit.

Where do they go? They exist. They change and move and react to the spirit of wind, and then they peel off and they vanish, and my staring cannot  bring them back. Where do they go? They continue to exist, even thought my eyes cannot see them. They have become something other. They are, they are trying to communicate something to me. They have —

Where do they go? Of what use was my seeing them, my fixed gaze on one feathery extension that looped back on itself, then scattered, then whorled, then knotted into a stream of steam and then fell apart into fragments…

Ah.

~ S.K. Orr