Reflections from Provence

With the aid of technology, I am able to behold things constructed beyond the outstretched hand of any mortal human, and these sights, these sites, I view in wonderment, enthrallment, my splotchy, pallid self amidst roiling oceans of white, gray when bloated by water, pink, purple, orange, and yellow daubed on fluffy churnings, swirlings, and spiralings into faces, animals, phalluses, torsos, ligaments, these figments created by the conjurer in my mind, flying above the roads and blinking buildings in a seemingly rickety airplane, nauseous dips, shrill noises reverberating ricocheting off a bellowing baby and a couple in conflict until the altitude and the speed has increased enough and the sound is no longer palpable, a current of cold air at my feet that makes them feel wet, and that steady vibration and humming of spinning that lulls me to sleep from fear or hypnosis. Upheavals of the earth, it exalts and I exult, these thrusts that aspire for the periphery of the firmament, and every so often the guide decides to stop the car for a moment to capture this scene on our cameras through rays of gray, this cyclopean rock juggernaut, flecks of brown betraying metals that rust, black streaks like a lightning strike cleaving the blue-gray cliché of what I typically think as a rock. No skyscraper scrapes the sky, but these monoliths try, and every time I alight from the leather-lined van I must reflect again on my place in the universe, but each essay for some symbiosis between the me and the other becomes more effete than the previous one, and when she says that this is great spot for a family photograph I feel my speck condensing even more, while the mountains loom larger, which signifies all that will thrive in the darkness and light when I am gone.