A young boy sat still with his face pressed against the cold tasteless glass of a porthole. He stared outward at a world no one else would dare try to capture, determined to fill his journal with everything he could perceive. No one knew why he was doing this, and they did not believe the boy when he answered that the sky spoke to him. They did not believe that the clouds could speak. How wrong they were. The boy listened closely against this small lighthouse aperture. Stuck in this tower, he had already read every book and enjoyed every fantasy. He poured himself into all these fictions to escape his captivity, faced with the reality of being stuck inside. He wanted more freedom. So, he turned to the clouds. They always had a story to tell; some they have been aching to share for a long time. Their tales were shaped by the winds that traveled through the lives of every person on earth. These winds which traveled through the open doors of every home and song. The boy knew science, and in all its understood mysteries, it was not the floating of watery wisps that defined the magic surrounding the clouds. Their true sorcery existed in their ability to bring the honest reflections and chronicles of what occurred here on Earth from oceans far away, taking life from one land and sharing that history in another. The child wrote fervently, enraptured by whatever he saw from his place by the small window. He did this every day. He listened to the sky at high noon, when he could see the calm winds morphing the clouds into a photograph of an epic’s climax. He listened even when the winds were high and thunderous, the invisible shaping whole new worlds for an ever-changing second. He recorded these tales. But the young thinker did not do this at night, else he would be distracted by the stars. He understood that the clouds loathe the stars that lorde above them. They screamed, “The stars never change! Why do you keep worshipping them so? You lament over deaf beings. Open your eyes to what is right here! Look and see that we have everything. Look and see that we listen to you.” The boy listened and allowed the gift of imagination to consume him in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable bareness, exposing his mind’s eye. What he saw in the clouds were scenes of himself, exaggerated as they may be. After all, the purpose of the sky was to reflect. The Infinitive Alpenglow of a Dimdream Reflection | Jacobus Marthinus Barnard
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