2494

 Horizon flight 2494, leaving Seattle for Bellingham at 11:05 PM. I’m munching on the pretzels I snatched earlier from the back of Horizon flight 2174 when no one was looking and listening to Ben Harper’s “Needed You Tonight” on my iPod. The cityscape sprawls through the port-side window like a complex glowing carpet. At any given moment, I am looking at hundreds of thousands of people, devoid of individuality from this height, nothing but drops in a phosphorescent sea. Streetlamps create peach-colored pools of light, arranged in rows to create fuzzy, rounded streaks of illumination slicing the prevailing darkness into manageable pieces. The occasional low-hanging cloud adds soft focus, like water drops on sunglasses, abstracting the separation of light and dark. The main roads snake lazily through the haze, a flowing ribbon against the checked background of smaller streets. The freeways lance through, stretching off toward the distance, gathering the larger of the surface streets to them like tributaries.
 As we rise higher, the city takes a more organic appearance. The grid of neighborhood streets fades into a delicate membrane separated by intersecting arterials. The lighted areas become great neurons with cities for nuclei, interstates for axons, headlights for impulses. A whole city on the move, hundreds of thousands making a single entity. A single braincell in the hivemind of the earth.
 R.E.M.’s “Perfect Circle” comes on. We climb higher. The moonlight deals a glancing blow to the surface of the sound, highlighting the coastline and separating the uneven tungsten glow from the uniform platinum sheen of the water. Manmade fungus against a clean petry dish. 12000 feet away, but I could be looking through a microscope. An impartial observer would have hard time determining what was nature and what was man. The woman next to me snaps on the light to read her skymall, and I stare at myself, fuzzy in the multi-pane aircraft window. For a second I stare, becoming accustomed to the change. I pull out The Filth and read.