Skywritten Promises
By Edger Ai Bington
Cleet VonMano was a man of few words, which is why it was alarming to everyone when he stapled a love poem to a Class-IV atmospheric research balloon with full telemetry package.
“DO NOT ATTACH ANYTHING TO THIS DEVICE,” the warning label said. Bright red. Bilingual. Underlined. Twice.
But Cleet wasn’t trying to sabotage his career. He was just… overwhelmed. That poem had lived in his shirt pocket for three winters since the day he met Maya Rojas at the Annual Meteorological Conference in Boise. (not the cool Boise ID, but the one on a rocky beach in Boise CT). She had eyes like big fluffy pure white clouds and laughed at his barometric pressure joke. No one had ever done that. Not even his mom.
Cleet had written the poem that night — badly — and carried it everywhere, waiting for a moment of scientific romance to strike. It never had. Until now and it felt more like desperation than insight.
The balloon drifted up into the chill of Alaskan twilight, Cleet’s heart thudding as the payload blinked green then blue, then vanished into the clouds.
“You did what?” asked his supervisor, four hours later.
Cleet blinked. “I conducted an unscheduled deployment of… an emotional payload.”
The room fell silent except for the distant hum of Gus snoring in the breakroom.
The Legend of Gus & the Drift
Let’s be clear — no one in the NOAA field division forgets The Gus Incident. It’s folklore.
Gus, once a rising star in the telemetry department, fell in love with a pastry chef from Des Moines and, like any rational man, tried to impress her with a handmade smiley face balloon-borne oatmeal-raisin cookie and a napkin love note. Instead, his “gift” ended up causing minor panic during a NATO surveillance operation over rural Latvia.
The phenomenon was later chalked up to Slow Lift Ballistic Drift — a rare (and entirely fictional) pattern of meteorological nonsense involving thermal pockets, inverted air masses, and “the moody side of the jet stream.” It’s since been called just stupid luck.
Now, Gus just mutters about Janine and sharpens pencils obsessively and pulls the erasers off.
Cleet, of course, had never believed the story. Until now.
The Transmission Heard ‘Round the World
Two days later, a retired radar hobbyist named Alphonse in Nova Scotia picked up a strange blip on his weather-tracking array. The signal carried a short-range broadcast: a poem. Static-smeared, full of wind noise — and longing.
He posted a transcription online, thinking it was a cryptic code or maybe Swedish slam poetry. It wasn’t. It was Cleet’s heartfelt verse, starting with:
“If clouds could whisper, they’d say your name —
Maya, my sun between storms.”
Within days, the poem went viral through the weather community.
Then came the real miracle: Maya Rojas saw it.
She was at a wind turbine demonstration conference in Portugal, eating custard tarts and trying to forget “a past full of almosts and maybes.” She’d never forgotten Cleet’s awkward charm. Or his quiet hands.
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And now… this?
She didn’t believe in fate. But she believed in calculated anomalies.
The Return Path
Since his brush with a confusing romantic burst, Cleet had been reassigned to cable maintenance and anti-stapling seminars when the package arrived.
No return address. Just a stamped envelope inside with a pressed blue lupine, and a note that read:
“If clouds could carry promises, maybe they’d carry this: Lisbon. Next month. I’ll be looking up.”
Signed simply,
Maya
Epilogue-ish
Gus now claims he invented love letters on weather balloons and demands royalties. No one listens, no one is paying.
Cleet? He’s on personal leave.
Some say he’s in Portugal. Some say he’s somewhere between the troposphere and destiny, carrying a new payload of poetry — and a wind-swept grin.
Postscript: What the Balloon Carried
Found snagged up in a pine tree outside Bergen Norway, this crumpled, half-frozen scrap of paper turned up in meteorological newsletters, conspiracy forums, all the social media blots, and eventually… Maya’s inbox.
Here it is, in all its stapled, heartfelt glory — the poem that circled the globe and stitched two nerds back together:
If Clouds Could Whisper
by Cleet VonMano
(Found taped to Payload 17B, later broadcast via drifting telemetry signal)
If clouds could whisper, they’d say your name —
Maya, my sun between storms.
I saw you once through snowfall glass,
Your laugh warmed my northern forms.
I stood there holding lukewarm tea,
You spoke of wind and data and grace.
My tongue jammed like a printer tray,
But your smile — it hard rebooted my face.
If maps could fold the way I feel,
I’d plot a course to where you are.
This poem’s flawed, it rhymes all wrong —
But it’s written on air, so it won’t scar.
If clouds could carry promises,
this one would ride the drift for you.
Thank you, you made it to the end of a heartfelt destiny story. The only hope to top poetry that profound, is a love song made from the power and finesse of the Slow Lift Ballistic Drift. It will premiere 8/29/25 , 9:00am Central Time Zone, USA, GMT +5 hours. Don’t miss it, it’s a thriller
