Maybe I still see rockets in the sky

I remember looking to the sky in my youth and thinking every plane a rocket, every bird a dragon, every wind a whistle, light and high. The trees would sway in the breeze and I would sway with them, the connection between us something I could feel in my bones, but never say aloud. I never said very much then, but I felt it all: the immensity of this world as a child within it. I remember pulling back coarse branches and parting prickly bushes; I remember how my hands felt in the mud, grass tickling against my palms, my fingers caked with dirt. I remember the feel of the smooth, cool rocks, the wriggling of worms, the smell of rain in the air. I remember my early winters, bundled in jackets and scarves, lying face first in the snow, wishing never to leave.

Nowadays, I want my winters gone. For winters feel longer now, even as the hours seem to fly by. The seasons all stretch past their pretty peaks, leaving us tired and in ruin by the end of each one, left emptier now than from the last before it. Yet cold still chills, and heat scorches all the same; all else matters not. The sun falls and rises again. People are born; people die. The sky falls dark. Rain falls down on our heads, soaking into our shirts and socks, leaving us sopping and lost, wearing us down. The vibrancy of the trees, the sun, the moon has dulled, and it feels like there is nothing more to see, nothing much to know beyond the blinks of our gazes and the touch of our fingertips against the open air, never to brush against the sky. There is so much we will never see, so much to uncover that it seems better to wallow in the misery of acceptance than to think of what we could do, if only we had the time and means to do it.

But children are not wrong. They simply see things for what they are, as much as they know to, while keeping close what they want it all to be. They keep this hope so close that they hold it out right in front of them like a spyglass to meet the eye, and their worlds are reflected back at them just the same, shaped and brightly colored by their newly whirring minds. They are wild and hard-hearted, adventurous and wily, emotional and isolated, wanton and wise. They are dreamers of the best and worst sorts, and they were never wrong all along.

I thought I saw a rocket yesterday, but it was only a plane. I felt like a child for it, but I felt no embarrassment, only nostalgia and a strange sense of joy. I watched the white streaks of contrails stretch across the open blue above our heads, marking the world with its ascent, painting the sky.

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