The Property of Clouds
My eyes have always seemed to have this habit of wandering. While on a drive, during class, or even in the middle of a conversation, they tend to unfocus themselves from their task and move about, glancing around the room, grazing over faces until they come to rest, more often than not, on the window or at least, what’s beyond it. My gaze travels across the ground, up the trees, and shoots high into the sky like a model rocket that’s about to win first place at the science fair. In the sky I find them, the clouds. They float there, hundreds of feet overhead, seemingly just outside my reach, hanging just past my fingertips. I gasp and stare, my wandering eyes finally at rest among the clouds.
Their beauty perplexes me, twists my insides around, because all my life I was taught that only perfect things are beautiful, that bumps and edges, irregularities, are unacceptable. Looking at the clouds I wonder how that can be true. Imperfectly sculpted, with bumps and irregularities galore, the clouds are beautiful.
I admire the clouds. They do not hide their feelings behind a facade of contentment. Their fierce emotion is on display for all to see. Raining sorrow, marshmallow-fluff joy, flickering, thundering rage, all apparent, unconcealed and no one thinks any less of them for it. The clouds change with each breeze and that change is neither good nor bad, just different. We do not chastise the clouds for their display. Instead, we watch, amazed as the clouds shift to form shapes on a summer afternoon. A dog! An airplane! We watch as their tears pattern our windows, listening to their woes falling like stars to the earth below, giving life to the land. We take in flickering lightning and booming thunder like fireworks on the fourth of July and, although we’re afraid, we respect their power.
Like the clouds, I am complex. I will never again be the person that I was yesterday and I won’t be the same person tomorrow. It has been hard for me to accept that I am beautiful. I want to believe that people are like clouds, complex, imperfect, and beautiful, powerful. For those moments when I look up into the sky, I believe that the world, and everything in it, is beautiful. I hope, in the future, that even without wandering eyes and windows, I can always be with my head in the clouds.
