I Deconstructed Lonely As A Cloud

Walking through airport departures

I deconstructed, lonely as a cloud,

wondering 'what is a cloud anyway?'

a union of oxygen and hydrogen,

a transient arrangement of familial water molecules,

clustering as nomads to camp fires

around the tiny condensation nuclei that seed them into life;

pinpricks peppering the guts

of a thing so soft and fluffy,

all born out of hot air rising,

an uplift in relative humidity,

going wherever the wind blows,

until fall-outs precipitate a return to earth.

And I wondered how a cloud could be lonely,

whether the conditions necessary to form one cloud

mean that there is a significant likelihood that siblings will be born,

the solitary cloud so being a statistical outlier,

an anomaly,

a freak of nature,

perhaps that's how.

So I asked the Met Office about lonely clouds:

they told me that it just meant that the air was very dry

and not capable of holding many clouds,

they considered the single cloud rather unremarkable;

it turns out that there are a lot of lonely clouds out there after all,

which led me to conclude that

despite each cloud's personal loneliness,

they can take solace in the fact that it's not just them,

and that as an only child,

they're also guaranteed,

by birthright,

the very best of the weather.