There's something about a sky that's giving way to storms. Especially when you drive with them, like it's a race to see who is faster and better. You know in your head that in the end the storm will always get the better of you. But it's sometimes the wonder in chasing the illusion that brings the greatest thrill.

     There they were, changing the masks from yellow to gray to black, sheer black. It was as though they thought by wearing different shades they could trick us, pretend that they were invisible. Maybe, just maybe, they could trick us. There was supposed to be a storm, right? All the weather forecasts has said it was likely. So maybe, the clouds seemed to say, if we just change our hues, let our prisoner the sun out for a few minutes, those measly humans wouldn't even know that the floods were about to rush in. Sort of in Noah's time: what desert ever floods when there never has been rain?

     And it was a grand illusion, a great ploy. At times the blackness cast shadows of night, a foreshadow of what those of primitive times seemed to have experienced when the sun was blotted out in an eclipse. At other times, the rays of the sun beamed through the edges. It was as though the clouds were posing for a picture in a church calendar: behold the glory of God. Let yourself be taken by the awe of nature, they said. And I will change once you think you've come to know me well.


     The revolving masquerade we witnessed had just begun, had come from absolutely nowhere. But that was the common surprise that we should have expected at the last second. After all, this was spring, the season of change. This was the time that was anticipated by those after a hard winter, a time when the melting of ice conjured images of warmth and serenity. It's always easy to personify everything around you, as though all of nature responds to anthropocentric metaphor. Melting of ice and the end of winter in a human means the end of a dark, cold phase, and the beginning of new hope. Melting of ice and the end of winter in nature is a totally different thing, a clash of the old and the new, an opposition of forces. The dark storm clouds and the white sunny clouds crisscrossing one another only brought that closer to focus. But it was easy to get lost in the search, like being blinded by a dream.

     The sun bounced out one final time that day, as it prepared to make its grand descent into the abyss so it could declare that nighttime had begun. So strange, again, the illusion, for all it was going to do was declare daytime somewhere else. But here, in this small space of the sky where we could see it, it was disappearing. The storm clouds billowed, as though they were gaining power in the diminishment of the daylight. What would someone think if there was no weather channel to put things into neat measurements, had no idea that there was another continent five thousand miles away? Would they see the looming clouds overcoming the sun as a sign of portent, an omen?


     Even knowing what the clouds were about to do and having everything placed into tidy forecasts, it was like running from the gods as we chased along their edges. Could we continue to evade their clutches? How much longer would it be before we were overtaken? Even a modern man will ask now, when will the rains engulf me?

     Soon enough, the sun slipped under the sky. It left behind a message of pale light as a token of remembrance. In this final twilight, the clouds boasted of their own importance, now that they had taken full stage. Whether they became blacker with night or blacker of their own accord made little difference. They harkened their own song to the foreground, and their darkness now reigned.


     The clouds won the race against us by declaring themselves omnipresent in the night. There was no way we could outrun their grasp, for the night would never tell where they hid. Finally the clouds found a way to be invisible, and now so were we. As the light of the sky slipped out, only man's light could illuminate our way home, before the masters of the storm came out to play games with those whom they found in their way.