A - Ambition

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I guess that this ambition of mine cannot truly be achieved. Someone once said that unattainable dreams are the best kind, but I'm not so sure. Once you know for certain your ambition cannot be achieved, well, it all falls into place doesn't it? You cannot be that which you want.

Someone I know said their life ambition was to ascend to space but their physical restraints meant, like me, it was impossible for them to be what they want to be. This is the closest anyone has ever got to understanding this disappointment of mine.

When you're a young impressionable child, your parents say you can be anything you want. My choice of profession has changed over the years, I must admit, but whose doesn't? No-one is ever really sure how they will turn out, not even in adolescence.

You see, I've always admired the sky. How one day it can simply be a grey shroud encapsulating the atmosphere, then the next it can be as limitless an azure as the sea below it. How birds have the freedom of flight, yet our wings are clipped. Of course we now have aircraft and, seeing as they are the closest thing to the sky, I've taken a keen interest in them.

If you showed me a picture of an aircraft (particularly military aircraft), I could probably tell you what it was named; or at least its codename. Hip, Little Bird, Warthog, Thunderbolt... these are probably all words you recognise, but did you know they are all NATO codenames?

In my opinion, the most beautiful aircraft ever made is a plane, and that plane is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Its smooth, black sheen and its arrowhead shape epitomises the aeronautics industry. Its service as a recon plane is now discontinued due to the breakthrough of new reconnaissance devices, mainly satellites.

I find the story of its secret development fascinating; the sort of clandestine science hiding behind the Cold War paranoia. It makes me wonder what they did with it.

This is why I'm more disappointed than ever. Because it means I'll never achieve my ambition. It's performed its soliloquy and bowed its last bow, and now the curtains have been called.

Not necessarily of course, associated with the Blackbird... but I wanted to be something I never could, perhaps deluding myself in the process. I wanted to be a pilot.

>-S->