#22: The Skylight

I live in the sky now, and it’s beautiful.

Come inside, but do watch your head: the ceiling is sloped and likes to jump out at you when you least expect it. Bob down further, there’s something I want you to see. Yes, that’s it, the window with the condensation and the unattractive smear of bird poo. But tuck your knees in and grab the blanket and know what it is like to sit in the sky.

The view is of a busy street, I know. There’s a petrol station and a takeaway and cars replacing each other every time you blink. But look beyond and you’ll see hills or clouds, a sunset or a sunrise, or raindrops holding onto lamplight as they slide down the glass. You’ll see the people busying up and down with backpacks and rucksacks and hastily eaten snacks.

And they’re all so small from up here. The window frame framing the world like theatre curtains, like the border of your phone embracing an Instagram shot. You can watch them anonymously. You can make up their stories, or you can just enjoy knowing that life is carrying on, that people are still paying 5p to lug a Sainsbury’s bag down the street, as Donald Trump is edging scarily closer to Presidency.

I read in this window, and this observer’s position echoes that of the reader: watching and not participating; free of the burden to interrupt the story, but full of the empathy of one in the know; able to see the beauty and the pain equally and unashamedly.

I watch sunrises and sunsets from this window, and I try desperately to trap them in Megapixels and share them with the world. But I never quite get it right, because at the end of the day, you are not here, with me, in a room so finite, so mine, so enclosing; watching the sun, so big, so universal, so full of life, paint a road so busy, so full of people coming and going and not watching where.

No matter what time of day, if out of the corner of my eye I see something — rain, mist, fireworks, the streetlamps turning on at 4pm — I crawl into the nook and look at the sky.

There are skylights all over the world. The Pantheon in Rome has a dome that arches upwards and then stops, encircling a piece of the sky. The building’s main source of light is this circle of sun that travels over the walls inside as the day passes on. The Louvre in Paris has a pyramid of glass erupting from the pavement, its modern diagonals criss-crossing the vertical pillars of the building behind.

But these buildings are letting light into their rooms, using it to illuminate what is inside. I am using my window to look out onto the world, to see what I normally miss.