When he asked me about the craziest flight I’d ever been on, I assured him he wouldn’t believe me.

He proceeded to tell me about a particularly rough flight to Chicago. They got rerouted to Detroit, refueled, waited a few hours, then returned to Chicago only to be told they couldn’t land. Forced to circle for another hour while they waited out the storm. A three hour flight from Salt Lake City had become an eight hour trip that depleted all the food and water on board.

And another time, he told me, the turbulence was so bad flying into Orlando, that they gave us each a three hundred dollar voucher to try to make up for it. One second my phone was under my leg, and the next it was flying to smack me in the face.

Those sounds wild, I said. But my story is kind of something else entirely.

Alright, he said. Let’s hear it then.

Coming into Seattle we took a long way around: out past the Olympic Peninsula and back east for landing. They didn’t ever mention why. As we made our descent towards the endless clouds blanketing a wintered western Washington, our plane hit thick air that held us at elevation. The plane slowed swiftly and softly, as if landing on the clouded floor of a clouded sky.

Slivers of blue flashed past my window as we tore through the clouded terrain. Engulfed by mountainous fluffs of white and released again and again. The wing ripped through the clouds in streaks, leaving eddies twisting onto themselves.

If you weren’t paying attention enough to notice our gradual deceleration, or the way the clouds flew by so level above the steady floor of white, you might not have known anything was happening at all. It was only once we had clearly stopped that the whole cabin became aware, at once perking up from their mile high daze. Some with faces pressed against the window, others gripping their armrests tight, or tucked under blankets with headphones in their ears.

I think we were all waiting for something to happen, expecting to fall through and plummet back to earth, or explode. Anything, it seemed, would be less painful than the suspense.

The pilot tried starting the engines again, but they only gargled and whimpered for a moment before fading, like a lawn mower starting on grass too thick. Each moment of thrust ripped a bit of cloud through the engine’s blades, but failed to move us. The radio too was either failing to send or failing to receive.

For the adventurous among us, anticipation eventually turned to curiosity. While the rest of the cabin froze and turned inwards to the overwhelming uncertainty, our minds pulled outwards. Enough to eventually gradually collect on the wings, looking around our white and fluffy void. Driven, no doubt, by our own flavor of anxieties, we wondered things like how far it all went, or whether we could stand on the clouds below.

We must be able to, right? One of us said. It’s keeping the plane up after all!

Though still, when someone sat themselves on the wings edge and jumped, we all gasped a bit, if not shift our stance. They fell as fast as you would expect, until they reached the layer of clouds, which slowed them so smoothly that none of us could tell the moment they finally touched down.

A smile grew across their face as they twirled with outstretched arms, lifting and swirling the clouds around them with joy. Water drops condensed on their hair and skin. The air is cool, they told us, but comforting too.

More of us followed, and swam in the sensations for a time: the hugging drag of walking through the dense air, the tickle of the freshest dew on our skin. Then we got to forming a plan, the greater situation returning to collective consciousness. Four groups of two — each equipped with drinks, snacks, and floatation vests in case of emergency — would split up and walk in different directions to survey the cloud field, agreeing to meet back at the plane in two hours. And another group would search the area around the plane to see if we couldn’t figure out for sure why it wasn’t falling through.

One group came back one short: they had found an edge of our clouded world. Another found a spot where the floor sagged and softened to stretchy white-gray. Another found nothing but more clouds, as far as they could see. And the last group, who came back twenty minutes late, brought news of what they could only describe as some kind of magic.

We never did find out how the plane was holding.

A half an hour into our trek to the supposed magic we heard whirring in the distance. Not the kind of metal though, and not consistent either. I imagined the sound to be of a bubble machine, if made by natural forces. Like a short and purposeful wind turning on and off. In some places, the cloud floor rippled in small hills that undulated with the sound — more so the further we traveled.

We could feel gusts as we got closer, and saw emerging puffs coming from an open piece of sky. As the clouds we stood on rippled and moved with the wind, a gap would form at the source, for a moment, before the whirring would start and fill it in.

Is this where clouds are born? One asked. None of us could come up with anything else.

So yeah, we discovered a cloud machine? And all we could do was stare.

Woah what? He said, and nothing else for a while. Then laughed, realizing, he said, that I was messing with him. But I wasn’t, I told him. It was all completely true.

Then, he asked, how did you ever get down?

That’s the most frustrating part, I told him. I don’t remember at all.

And the other people on the plane?

Yeah, no idea. I said. I’ve tried to look up names I remember hearing or find the list of passengers who were on that flight. But I’ve had no luck in confirming that any of them made it back too.

He looked at me deeply, trying to find some truth, some proof of deception in my eyes. Then his gaze floated to the clear summer sky, his mind lost in the clouds, trying to put himself there, trying to imagine it all.