High lights

There's something about the Kentucky air.
It's sweet as I step off the plane, and suddenly I'm back home.
That's how it ends.
The 8 p.m. from LaGuardia, flight 3033, U.S. Airways, is 10 minutes late -- 30 minutes early by LaGuardia standards -- the stewardess happy to be back. She's from Louisville because she pronounces "LOOVUL" properly on the intercom.
I wait to check my voice mails. It's nothing pressing I need to do, not at this time at least.
As I gather my luggage a group of girls make a rush to get out first, from the back, and they look impossibly tan, and one has sunglasses on, in the night, and I reach into my pocket for my phone then, because I'm pushed farther down the queue, and fumbling to listen to my voicemail I'm surprised to hear it's Ray and she's back from Europe as of yesterday, and she says she knows I'm probably tired, and fed up with nightlife after New Yorl, and probably broke, but it was a ridiculous trip in Europe -- one she needed a few drinks after -- and we could review it all later, but I should come out tonight, again, because she was with friends and all of my friends wanted me out.
My mouth is parched and suddenly I want water.
The kids look too impossibly tan, they really do, racing out as the stewardess opens the air lock. Nobody cares about skin cancer any more.
We walk down the tunnel and into the terminal and I always have that feeling that I forgot something, left something back there.
Outside the stars shimmer, and it's surprising because I'm used to the light pollution of the mega-city.
It's not raining, but in central Ohio, before our descent, I looked out the window and saw thunder clouds built like cities flashing lightening and spewing rain down on the ground below, cars like ants in perfect little lines making their way through the storm with their headlights like little eyes.
I'm not worried about the weather. It's too damn humid and showers would be savior to my sweaty brow.
In LaGuardia things moved fast for the first time I had been through there. That hustle makes for a sweaty plane ride.
In the early night we took off from New York, and I think it was a little more humid there,actually.
The plane lifted, the wings catching a current, rising in the evening sky. Sunset was on the right side, the window opposite of me alight in an orange glow.
Lifting past Manhattan, the high lights of the city, I saw her apartment, or maybe the building next to it, or the general cluster of buildings in that area in which she lived. Then again I forgot what the facade of her building looked like and I didn't really know what I was looking for and I didn't really know if I would find hers specifically, and I guess it wasn't important because I thought of her none-the-less. I missed her right there, feeling like my life was a little more vacant as we flew over and away, higher and faster, and faster and higher into the clouds until her building was gone. The high lights faded.
I laid back and my wondering wandered and I thought that everything in the past seems to move faster and faster until you forget, and then it's gone. My memories are clouded. So I thought about her a little harder.
Manhattan is nice at night and it was a mooney night that night in the high lights when we first met, her and I. That's what I remember without even trying.
And if memory serves me well, she complained that she couldn't get a tan that summer because of the constant rain.
That's how it started.
There was just something in the air.
I think I smiled then like I smiled en-route to Louisville, Kentucky, the 3033, 8 p.m., out of New York.
In my car I switch the ignition, speed away from the parking structure. Alone on the highway, eyes adjust to lower lights of smaller civilization.