Picture This: Skye Drive-By

Wind ramps over the hood of the car. Trees and grasses bend. Clouds elongate, then bunch. Mountains materialize, then disappear in veils of mist. Setting sunlight hums from the blue, all the world below fanning its plumage. I am looking through the glass, the car jostling and rattling beneath me. My camera catches this firefly in the jar, not me. Every other photo is a blur, the sky, mountains, and villages streaking like paints running on a palette. There is a window between us. And a fence. And an ever-widening chasm of time.

I don’t know where I am except on one of Skye’s lonely roads. Friends, met here and made in Scotland, disappear in the rearview mirror. That temporary orbit ended. Can anything endure? Every subsequent moment vies to erase the last, and they pile upon each other like silt in the River Sligachan. With all the eagles in my mind, I rarely look down to see what I stand upon. Is it sediment or sentiment? Forgive me, but both, perhaps, for this upheaval reveals all the strata. I roll the window down, take it in, let it buffet me, let the tears blur it.