sky report

on being moved—

gabriel texted me from our rooftop this afternoon, around the time my workday was wrapping up. it was a picture of the sky and the sunset, with “so good,” and it was. sometimes when you see something beautiful you want people you love to see it too.

i left my laptop behind, and climbed a flight of stairs and then the ladder up to the heavy roof hatch; when that dark square swings open to the sky it seems to inhale you up into the expanse. 

g wasn’t there anymore so i sat alone on the raised abutment between our roof and the neighbors’, watching the sunset happen; a bird perched on top of the church next door, amidst the cellphone poles, commenting in song on the sky. i felt like we were watching the day end together. i wasn’t alone after all. from where i was exposed on the roof i could hear the strong wind lifting the air around me in various directions, could hear the trees around our building talking to the wind in their hushed voices. 

the clouds were enormous and puffy, feathering at the edges across the baby blue expanse. behind me they were stamped across the sky by a clone tool, getting smaller and smaller in a curved line toward the horizon of the red buildings that made up the bed-stuy projects. 

briefly i wanted to run back down to my apartment and grab my phone to take a picture to show you this particular splendor, but i didn’t. sorry. i am trying my best here to show you something beautiful. i spent some time up there in the air and light thinking who needs drugs when you can just feel all this instead and how could you not believe in magic.

more than usual i thought about me, and how drugs and magic are just ways to feel something else other than yourself, how lucky i was to feel anything at all.

i guess i have always been thankful for roof access, especially on blisteringly hot summer afternoons where gabriel and i lie reading and sweating side by side on their blanket. or on nights where the moon is especially good, and i stand there alone under its glow, marveling that i cast a shadow, that i was a solid body, to my surprise. 

oh about my body—i’ve been nursing a couple of injuries: tennis elbow from lifting weights, and patella tendinopathy from biking. lifting and biking are both deeply pleasurable experiences to me: choosing a muscle and watching it swell, and suddenly one day carrying groceries laundry or my bike up the stairs is less a chore and more just another thing i can do. and biking—hurtling through the smells of a neighborhood, past cars, the occasional stop sign, every part of me working in tandem with a simple machine to get where i want to go, or how sometimes i can just pull over and look at the moon. jeffrey mcdaniel said i don’t wish to be in your arms i just wish i was pedaling a bicycle toward your arms, or something like that. 

all this is about agency—that i can get stronger and faster if i want it, that i can lift the weight of my own heart, that i can seek a beautiful view, that i can leave, that i can stay. i want the same for you. it’s not about freedom, but motion. if some pain is the price of traveling from a to be, i am happy to pay.

the clouds above me shifted and bloomed, burnished at the edges, darkening at the center, on their slow way somewhere else. 

the trees were all around me bending with the unruly wind, pointing me in all the directions i could go.

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i wrote another post the other day but i’m not sure where it went. you can read it here; it’s extremely nsfw so beware!