“Isn’t the sky so much bigger in the Southwest?”

A few weeks ago I was talking to a professor and I happened to mention that I’m from California. She sighed and said, “Isn’t the sky so much bigger in the Southwest?”

I didn’t think too much of it at the time, too busy scurrying back and forth between brick buildings under the slate gray of the mid-Atlantic sky. It was only when I was flying back home (I’ll still call it that, I guess, grudgingly) that I understood what she meant. We were floating over some mountain range (somewhere in Arizona, I think) as the sun was setting and the sky was this gradient of pastels pierced through by a blinding orange orb. It was then, with my nose up against the double panes, that I felt I was returning to familiar territory.

Down on the ground, taking my first stroll the next afternoon, I was struck by how all-encompassing the blue above was. That professor was right, it isn’t like this on the East Coast. It’s a strictly Southwestern phenomenon, that blue stretching on past tomorrow, making you want to drive away on some abandoned highway, one hand absentmindedly minding the wheel, the other out the driver’s side window, waving at the wind. It’s something you find in the land of mesas and vistas and plateaus, the feeling that you could lie under this sky for days and not see all of it. It’s the kind of sky that makes you think about your life for hours, all the while acknowledging that your little foibles don’t matter all that much. It makes you aware of the infinite number of ways this life could’ve turned out, and how strange it is that it’s gone exactly as it has.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. Maybe because I feel the need to get all of this out of my small brain and into the big sky. Maybe if I take the time to reflect on it, hash it all out, the next time I’ll be better, wiser, calmer. Maybe I’m hoping this will be cathartic. Maybe I want a stand-in for the California sky, something to make me feel small and understood.