Cloud watching

Watching the clouds move is a very bad habit; it is worth nothing. It just takes you to, here I go again, what they call distant memories. It just brings you to what bums call the uncertain future.

Clouds often come in their fluffy disguise: like party ice creams never melting, like pink, carnival cotton candies forever sweet and like feather pillows feeling softer the tighter you hold it. They hold as firmly as they possibly could unto the sky and go away so slow: like turtles swimming back to their birthplaces, like raindrops percolating back to aquifers, like spirits waiting for rapture. And while these clouds are on their way to the disappearing, it is best to bear with the awful sight of them.

Some clouds, however, appear so thin and dream-like with their forms so momentary. They lose to the blowing air but they conquer the skies. Oh, I’m most in love with them without their silver linings and without their pink-orange hues borrowed from the sunset. I love them so much that sometimes I can’t help wishing for them to stay suspended in my view, in that simple state, forever. I don’t want them to be just another memory of a sunny day, a memory that can vanish with old age.

So there, that’s why cloud watching is a very bad habit; it is inexplicably useless since you can’t keep a memory of them. But this isn’t so for the sea.

You see, the sea watches these clouds painstakingly, day after day, keeping track of their stubborn movements. The sea mirrors everything—brightness and gloom—even from such a distance. It’s always been that way for her. After all, distance cannot undo the fact that the clouds are hers…her very own…formed droplet by droplet…out of her own tears. When these clouds finally fly, she doesn’t keep a memory of them; she follows them everyday, everywhere and they don’t even notice at all.

I can’t love these clouds like how the sea loved them. Maybe not now. Maybe not even in the near future. But I love watching them. Well, I can watch them. To the end of days.