Reach up, up, to the cotton candy skies. To the heavens of pink, of white, and of gray, to the spun-sugar taste of a spring’s lovely day. The fire’s smoke twists into skeins of dark air, but the blue sky’s cobwebs knot into pale hair. Sunlight and moonlight and light of all hues, quiet in violet and in all types of blues. Cotton candy and whiskey, starlight and wine, the ghost of the sea and the sharp air’s bright shine.

Under the clouds, under the woven dreams and the needlepoint stars, people glance at lights of their own. They watch their stories, their phones, themselves, and they watch each other, the reflections of themselves they find, no matter how distant those refractions may be, but they don’t reach up. They reach out, weave webs of their own, the sky’s blooming clouds taken on loan. The mist of the winter, backed by the starlight of the heavens, and the recollections of summer as they weave through June and August and July, bright as fruit from a summer-grown tree.

The beauty of the thing, the idea of silence and of peace, is the faint reminder of souls, of the blood that flows in our veins and the dreams that light the backs of our eyes, the pale, iridescent memories of what we once were or what we could be.

What we could be, as a people. What we might be.

What we are is too dull, after all, isn’t it? Because what we are is a now, not the sweet nostalgia or heady regret of yesterday and not the bright promise or terrible inkling of tomorrow. Now is now, the forgotten heavens above our heads, not the cotton candy clouds of an idea not yet formed or the torrential rain of a memory pummelling the backs of our minds. Now is a tomorrow brought to life, a yesterday that is just being born, a reminder that living is no more than blood and neurons, and no less than something more.

Those spun-sugar heavens are meant for tomorrows, so reach out, out, and up to them, until cotton candy skies become the melted sugar of a sweet today.