Over Miami

Airports are always a bit like a dream. I usually have not slept the night before, drift in and out of wakefulness all day, and unwittingly prefer to glide through the process in a daze rather than acknowledge that these strange places full of people are in fact real.
Nearing the end of a day that began at 5:00 a.m. and recently culminated in a 5-hour wait in the Miami airport, I have fallen asleep in my airplane seat waiting for delays to be sorted out. The plane begins to move and I wake and look out the window to pick out skyscrapers in the dark. As we leave the ground I watch the variously shaded orange and blue stars on the ground form patterns; Miami is really laid out in a grid, orange lights delineatng the streats on the grid, and yellows and blues haphazardly displayed within each square, jewelled with red neon on some tall buildings.
It is a patchwork, not of the grass and water and concrete that Miami was when we came in, but a patchwork quilt of light, such as I can think of no real analog for. Strange gray worms snake slowly across the scene, and I realize they are the same white cotton-candy clouds we've been flying over all day. Several people begin to take flash photos of the lively scene--will that really work?
And suddenly I realize that we are not, in fact, on the ground. "We're not in America. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh we're not in America anymore," I silently muse. The momentary panic subsides as I watch the gray worms farther out stratisfying the light-quilt, which I now realize has abruptly ended. "Oh God, we're over the ocean."