The Sky is Always Out of Reach

You are 12 years old. You’re growing up in an apartment on the 77th floor of supertower 27. It’s a very nice apartment, with a private bathroom, a private kitchen even. You don’t waste a lot of time wishing it had a window. Your family is not poor but you’re not rich either, certainly not private window rich. Only a tiny fraction of the apartments have windows. Most of the windows in the tower are in fancy businesses, where a 12 year old cannot hang out and gaze at clouds without spending some money, which you don’t have. Your school occupies a quarter floor of the tower and has a number of windows, but not in the classrooms, where skygazing would be too much of a distraction from the lessons. The windows are in teachers’ and administrative offices. When you get in trouble and get called into the principal’s office, you get a glimpse at the sky before you are required to sit down facing her desk and discuss your behavior. You can feel the sky behind you, taunting you. She can look over your shoulder and watch birds circling while she sighs and frowns at you. Facing her desk towards the window, and your chair away from it, might have been an intentional power move. More likely it never occurred to her to face her desk any other way. She almost certainly can’t afford a window apartment herself. The office view is likely the only luxury in her life and the only recompense for a difficult and an otherwise thankless job. This is what your mom said when you complained about the unfairness of the seating arrangement. Anyway, if you don’t like it, don’t get called into the office. Your mom used to work in a nice restaurant where she could look out the window anytime, except she almost never had a chance to stand still long enough. That window wasn’t there as a luxury perk of the job, it was there for the paying customers. Sometimes you were allowed to hang out there after school, before the dinner rush, if the manager wasn’t working that day. Now she works an office job, which pays more money and she’s not on her feet all day, and she’s home for dinner, which is all good, but you miss those afternoons with the windows. You could, theoretically, go down to the ground floor and walk outside. You’re a citizen and this is still a free country. There wouldn’t be anywhere for you to go, you wouldn’t be allowed to enter any of the other towers, and there’s nothing open to the public within walking distance. But that would be fine, you could stand on the sidewalk and breathe fresh air and look directly at the sky and clouds and birds. Maybe even hear the birds. But you’re not allowed to. You don’t know if the gang violence is as bad as your mom says. In the times you’ve gotten to look out the window you’ve never seen anything interesting happen on the streets, just automated delivery trucks pulling into the loading dock where your dad and his friends unload the goods all day and night, and pulling out again empty and rolling away. You’ve never seen a gang war or even a robbery, although you admit there must be some reason all the delivery trucks are so heavily armored. Anyway you haven’t spent much time looking down, not when you could be looking up, so who knows what happens that you haven’t seen. You’ve always followed the rule, and you’ve never been outside the tower. You have recently started to realize that there will come an age when your mother’s second-hand fear no longer has enough power to keep you inside, but that age is not now. A few of the kids in school have window apartments and they talk incessantly about a rainstorm or an interesting cloud formation like the hottest gossip. Actually a statistically unlikely number of kids claim to have windows and you suspect a few of them are just reading weather reports and bluffing. None of them have ever invited you over to play, where you could see their window yourself. Maybe all of them are bluffing. Maybe they all read the same weather report and that’s why none of them ever get caught out on their bluff. None of the kids ever claim to be from the penthouse apartments, the ones with open air roof decks. Either the people who live there don’t have kids, or their kids get private tutoring. Or maybe their kids actually do go to your school and are careful not to say so. Maybe all the kids with real windows never talk about it at all.