"Is there anybody out there?"

New Jersey

So many planes.
On a hot summer day me and Jackie lay out on the front lawn, listening to music and enjoying the fresh air. Blue skies, lazy clouds inching across our vision. Nothing hampered our view.....except the planes. Big, small, commercial, military, high and low their contrails crisscrossed through the blue, streaking it white, turning the sky plaid. "How many is that?" I wondered aloud as another appeared on the horizon. Within ten minutes of looking up, without craning our necks or even straining our eyes, upwards of twenty planes had crossed within our eyesight.

I back-stepped, regaining my balance, tilting my head further skyward. Not a cloud stained the blue above me. The sky seemed so expansive the plane seemed to move at a snails pace heading northwest. Mongolians eyed me suspiciously as they passed me on the street, no doubt thinking, What is this dumb American doing now? As I stumbled and swayed from side to side straining my neck to follow an airplane. If this were the first one I'd seen I would have thought the aircraft lost, having wandered off its flight path the pilots having decided to make the Hail Mary decision and fly into the unknown. I could count on one hand the number of planes I have seen since I've been here. Always flying in the same direction, I've hypothesized they're traveling from Beijing to somewhere in eastern Russia (Irkutsk? Chita?), no layover in Mongolia. The huge airliner full of its business people, vacationers, and travelers, moving from one big city to the next. It seemed I could look out into infinity, blue sky, flat steppe, me standing in little Omnodelger with its wooden houses, and little white gers, and tiny dirt roads. I stared back up again as the plane came directly overhead. It gave me a bittersweet sense of isolation.
I wonder how many of them know they're over Mongolia?
Do they know they're on top of a town?
..........
No one knows I'm even here.