I’ve taken it upon myself to monitor the sky. Specifically, I’m responsible for the small patch of stratosphere that sits above the apartment building across the courtyard from me. On weekdays (and weekends) I sit behind the glass of my balcony door in my foldout camping chair with the armrests that slip and take notes on the irregular cutout of 2D space for 30–40% of my day; I must witness its imperceptible shift from blue to blue to blue because, if I don’t, no one will. And the sky deserves the attention, deserves to be acknowledged by somebody.
It’s an insular profession, sky watching. Unlike your typical job, I have no clients or coworkers or customers to interact with—not even digitally. I just log the transitions, and any peculiarities:
09:50 – clock on, sky colour #00BFFF.
10:07 – illuminance breaches 100,000 lx.
10:18 – cirrus cloud covers sun, return to 80,000 lx.
10:52 – colour transitions to #87CEEB.
11:05 – Qantas plane slowly slashes from SW quadrant to NE quadrant.
11:15 – colour transitions to #87CEFA.
11:18 – 8 kt wind eddies into the courtyard and disturbs the bottom boarder of my prescribed space where it's made up by the top branches of a fig tree. This kind of throws me off because the shape and size of my window warbles and I don’t know if I should be concerned with little snippets down the bottom edge that flicker between blue and green because it’s unclear if they’re my territory.
11:48 – a minor bird skips across the screen.
These kinds of bland and tedious, extended-focus-requiring professions call for a specific personality type and mood. It’s impossible to show up to work if I’m feeling restless or enthused, so to mitigate the risk of falling off task, I have a morning routine. I wake and coffee and read while drinking. I shit and shower and eat. Then I make Jess a coffee, farewell her and then meditate. And each of these individual tasks is of increasing importance for generating the required sky-watching mindset, each step builds up to this one crunch point—a walk, then a jog and then a sprint at a springboard—so that when the barrier of work is reached, I have the momentum to breach the entry hurdle into productivity. Therefore, the last step in the routine is critical. If I miss the springboard or bottom out, the entire day of work is shot. So, after meditating, I write. I read over what I wrote the day before, loathe it, and press my forehead to paper on the desk in front and slump like this for 20 mins, willing words to seep through the pores in my forehead and onto the page. And then, finally, when I’m ready to work, I’ll lift my head, find an absence of sweat-inscribed cursive, moan my way into the right mindset and clock on in the camping chair.
Lockdown has been a real godsend for my sky-watching experience. Isolation generates all these emotions that help me look out the window for extended periods of time: numbness, drowsiness, loneliness, ennui. But the most helpful of these emotions is longing. I see a sunny day, see it brighten, and think it’s beautiful. I look through smudges on the glass to the sunny externals and think, I wish I could go outside. And it’s important to ignore my logical brain trying to tear down this longing, important to repress the knowledge that I am allowed to walk in the park, play tennis with a friend, go skating or cycling or for a Sunday drive. I must ignore reason to keep myself indoors; I must watch my allocated portion of sky.
Though sunny days are simple, my favourite work days are the glum ones, burdened with persistent coverage of oppressive cloud. I like to see cold fronts eddies into the courtyard, watch the trees hunch their shoulders and shiver and and draw themselves in. I’ll watch the sky and try to see past the press of falling rain, and try to imagine the colour on the other side. And I’ll fail to perceive the sky’s image and brightness, and I’ll shrink in my camping chair and chew my inner cheek. I like these grey days because they mirror my mood. And I like that I don’t feel guilt for staying inside. But most of all, I like them because the cloud seems persistent, boxes me in interminably, a forever-prison. I like drizzle days because they appear—they appear—to be endless things.
[1] Joel is an almost-solipsist (not the egotistic but the existential kind). Sometimes, it feels like there is this crackly interface between his skin and the air around, a disconnect, so he can’t truly touch anything, so he can’t interact with reality, and this pushes him beyond solipsism—ironically to the opposite of it—he begins to feel unreal.
[2] One rainy Saturday, Joel is ordered to go shopping, to leave the house for the first time in eight days. ‘But I can’t interact with the world,’ he says. ‘I’m a ghostly, non-existent thing.’ And, as any real being would do, his girlfriend ignores the complaint. So he parks his car on the corner of Crewe and Confectioners and tucks deep into his hoodie to escape the rain. Two Irishmen pass and don’t glance up. Why would they? A German terrier (a hypersensitive species), trots head-on into his shins. He is clearly not meant to be here. He feels an invader, wandering the aisles, stealing groceries from the shelves: the last bunch of parsley, cooking cream on special, sharp parmesan cheese, things that don’t belong to him but to the people who are real.
[3] Joel pays for his groceries at the self-service machine (the cashier straight up ignores him). And then—because you know how Joel is feeling—he slips into the bottle shop where, at the entrance, there’s an employee stacking Pinot Noir bottles onto wire-rack shelves. The drizzle outside abates to a mist. A dog emits a hollow bark.
Joel tightens his grip on the shopping bags, fearful that the strap might slip through his palm. And then, the employee lifts their nose, and seems to smell the air. Their eyes turn to Joel, and their eyes connect with Joel’s, and the employee says, ‘Hey, how are you?’ And in that moment, the sky outside splits, and sunlight drenches the world. Joel returns home, sits at his study, and actually, with real pencil on paper, writes.
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