at some point this morning after i woke up and lay, still blinking, in bed, i looked out of the slanty window and caught a sight which felt at once familiar and as if it was part of a distant memory: a plane streaking diagonally across the sky, leaving behind a long white trail across the cerulean-gray backdrop. the line lingered, its edges choppy and tapered like graphite, for about thirty seconds afterwards before it gradually dissipated.
what felt particularly strange was that i was both sure i had seen countless plane contrails over the course of my lifetime and at the same time unable to remember when i had last seen one. the first memories which immediately came to mind stemmed from a very distant past: the first one, lying in my bed in maryland on an anemic fall afternoon shortly before i moved out of the house which i’d shared with my ex, and the second one, ages before that, as a two-year-old watching space shuttles taking off from cape canaveral with my mother - although i suppose that those particular trails came not from planes but rather rockets.
as i watched the line evaporate this morning i thought about how, of all the roughly 100.000 flights which take off every day, only some unknowable percentage of those airplanes will have visible vapor trails at any given point during the course of their flight (i looked this up later and found out that the appearance of contrails depends on a combination of cold air, humidity, and the altitude of the plane). and then i thought about how someone had once come up with the idea to write messages in the sky using smoke from their plane, and how i must’ve looked up in awe many times from the shores of some beach, captivated by the image of a swirling aircraft leaving fading shapes and letters behind its tail. what a perfect example of the hope and romanticism of us humans: the idea to leave fleeting messages for each other on a canvas as broad and airy as the sky.
I just noticed a contrail the other morning and thought to myself, "huh, haven't seen one of those in a while," so we are on same *plane - ha, tho i definitely see them A LOT more than you, just seemed like months since i'd last seen one. . .maybe cuz i'm not looking up as much. Also, regarding writing in the sky, it reminded me of two things: 1) dermatographia and 2) i used to embroider symbols and/or backward writing on pillowcases for loved ones such that if they were a side sleeper, they'd wake up with an imprinted image or message on their cheeks. It's so fun to see what you see!