Where are you from, they ask, as we are hovering many feet in the air. When you’re aloft you start with the easy inquiries, the comments on the weather. The distance between our feet and the ground never far from (at least my) mind.

Not really anywhere, I say half the time, we've been moving around for a few years.

More recently - we’re from here, as of a few weeks ago.

Really, they say, surprised. I guess I don't look like someone from here. The locals sigh a little. They are tired of people finding out that here is a gem. I'm an interloper. I represent traffic at the red light and in the lift line. I'm the reason there is a cacophony of backhoe backup-beeps scraping the earth to make more homesites. They are hesitant sometimes to talk about their favorite parts of being from here. They still want to to keep a corner for themselves.

The people from not-here are more enthused. This place is great, they say. Been coming here for awhile. It's better in the winter. It's amazing in the summer. Have you been down that Forest Road yet? Ironic that the folks from farther away are more overtly enthusiastic than the ones who make this their permanent home. Maybe there's something to be said there for not feeling like you own something to appreciate it a little more.

But the Buddhist answer to the question of where are you from is that right now, I'm from the space between the ground and the sky. I'm suspended. I'm in between.

For the length of this cable I could be from anywhere. My identity discerned by nothing much more than the types of skis I'm wearing and the tone of my voice and my choice of words because nothing much else is visible. It's hidden under layers of balaclavas and gloves and jackets and three sets of pants. Protection and obfuscation.

Most of these lift ride chats take a well worn path. Rarely does it take a deeper turn, we're only here for a handful of minutes after all. When it does it sticks out. In looking back down to the valley where a picturesque mountain town sits, the river makes s-curves so wide they almost touch edges. This is the same pattern that I have been using to attempt to slow myself down in descending the mountain. The river's path makes the same shapes we are making in the side of this mountain. This comes out of my mouth out loud and the girl next to me looks at me with wide eyes.

These words fall back to earth like the snowflakes that made this place what it is. There they sit, indistinguishable from others. On my descent maybe I'll rearrange them into a different pile. Maybe someone else will pick one up and use it for their own. Maybe the sum of all the conversations is sitting there below the hovering chairs. It will melt and return to the earth. Those words will re-absorb into the soil and make a soft landing or a creche for windblown seeds.

What if swirling around us on my favorite grey snowy day with the picture perfect flakes - what if those were the words spoken by the people who have sat suspended in the air before me? What if the quiet that comes with that kind of snowstorm was Mother Earth dampening the audio but turning up the visuals? What if the air held and then released the conversations that took place in liminal space? What if we were surrounded by arguments and loving murmurings and didn’t even know it? They fell around our ears and one or two stuck to our fingertips? We missed the majority of them but felt comforted somehow.

Knowing even that they will fade, these airborne missives, these silent communications. It’s romantic, I know, to think of spoken language as something more permanent as to stick around after it’s already said aloud. Of course words said aloud are memorialized in recordings and movies and memories. But there’s a pleasant fullness in my chest when I look out as far as I can see and imagine that each of the tiny bits of frozen water falling earthward hold a meaning I’ll never know.

They will melt and they will fade and they will had purpose if only for the time it took to fall from cloud to ground.

Inspired by events in Park City, Utah.