It was December. It was a clear day, but it still had that strange lighting that winter is so notorious for around here. In most places there is rain or snow. Here there is a dismal color that lasts for three months. Some days it is beautiful and soft and some days it is like a gas. Even at one o'clock in the afternoon, when the summer months would be flaunting their sunshine and spilling untainted blue across the sky, there is just an eerie radioactive hue. It makes you question time, like when you wake up from a nap but think it's actually time to get ready for school.
The highway I was on ascended a small incline. It lurched between two stadiums with their vast moats of parking spaces and white lines. I looked ahead, as my mother always reminded me to do on the highway. Life is too precious and cars are too dangerous to be sight-seeing. She was a very nervous woman.
A page from a newspaper, anonymously read and discarded, suddenly billowed out from under a set of speeding tires. It arched high into the clear green air, hesitated in a way that made you feel like you were watching a pivotal moment in your life unfold, then reluctantly glided back to the concrete. I thought of the lofty wings of a White Crane and how they are too much for the bird to manage at first take off, and then they settle into their graceful motion and flight happens. I thought of projectile vertical motion, such as I was learning in physics class. I thought of how each were pleasant comparisons, but each came from a different part of my brain, and why was society so obsessed with science when seeing this newspaper as a crane was so much more beautiful.
