I Ride a Dragon Named Southwest

I have clambered into the great steel dragon along with other riders. Sitting with my feet on my seat, I always bend my knees into that little cramped position. Stretching out my legs just feels too strange.

A great booming voice tells me that we'll be there in an hour and a half. I prepare saliva for combating air pressure change. That's what always made me feel dizzy while flying. Sometimes when we spiral down at a slant and land really abruptly, I feel like my stomach will continue moving and get tossed out of my mouth like it's not even useful.

While we took off and gained ground ... er ... sky, my head was always turned towards the left, looking out at the great wide wonder out there. I wonder if birds and metal dragons are infinitely wiser than the rest of us, for they see both worlds clearly. Do they prefer one over the other? Maybe our world is only good for food. Birds nibble crumbs that chubby human toddlers throw at them gigglingly and dragons guzzle organic fluids.

I'm the weird girl sipping Bloody Mary Mix, Hot Cocoa with Hazelnut Cream, or black coffee before settling into a snooze. I don't try to be different. It's complimentary.

I saw mountains just like they appear on maps and globes. Bumpy and like broken pieces of Oreo cookies. It was strange, comparing nature to our manmade things. We climbed higher in the airy kingdom and passed through the great plasma membrane. As we floated above that opaque thin layer, I saw the organelles below. The cytoplasm was blue, rippling and like a great aquamarine desert, shifting sand, shifting water. How ironic that two very different things can look so similar.

I saw another dragon zooming past. Was it flying faster than mine or do things always appear that way? It left a trail of smoke and seemed in a great hurry to get somewhere. We cruised along mindlessly.

As we approached San Jose, we crossed the barrier again. It's cool entering a cell. You see all the little patches and bits below. However, I saw little capillaries with little differently coloured blood cells moving steadily below. Is the whole world a cell or is it an organism? It's confusing. Maybe we've got it all wrong. Maybe we don't know everything. Maybe science is a guess, and facts are well-wishing opinions.

There are lots of farms around Silicon Valley. The technology hub of the United States is surrounded by hardworking people who comb the land and plant nature. Opposition. Juxtaposition. The little fields are different colours of bright greens, verdant and fresh, browns, khaki. It reminds me of a makeup palette, with the little rounded corners of the shaded squares. The surrounding hills were a mix of the greenest green and browns, and looked like CG'd terrain you see in a computer game.

The more materialistic and advanced the world gets, the more our views will shift like this. Maybe Earth is plastic, after all. As the great talons of "Southwest" scratched the ground and screeched to a halt, the time for thoughts was over. A greater feat was to be accomplished in this human world: impressing my perfect boyfriend's parents.