On Rooftops

the third and final instalment of On Stoops & Balconies

Dancer by Gino Soccio is the timestamp by which clouds shimmy across the latent blue sky. I am staring at The City, the nippled top of The Gherkin taking centre stage, surrounded by a chorus of glass and cranes and capitalism.

A rooftop is not a surrogate for a stoop nor a balcony (though they fall under the same umbrella). It may be the realm I enjoy the most, but then again they’re slightly incomparable. But it just so happens that after a year of abundant change, relative instability, and not necessarily a place I felt was home, I have somehow found one with a rooftop and a consequent restoration of stability resonant of that found in all those balconied gems I have been blessed to dwell in previously. Homely piety restored, devotedly returning to my nightly altar that looks out at The Shard and the skyscrapers of EC1.

I fill every glass window in the city with thoughts of who or what may be behind it. Arriving home post-shift to silent streets at 2am is incongruent with the mass of fully lit buildings. Does anyone ever sleep? Or are they stuck in the glassy worker-bee-hive as perennial lighting may suggest? I flick cigarette ash to the ground and watch it flurry around me in the wind. My nights run something like this, and I love it. I think about fried chicken and that one song the neon rickshaw blasted in Bloomsbury last night; I think about the lives of others and what I am doing with my own; I think of everything, and I think of nothing. Eternal moonlight of the jumbled mind.

I’d like to quit smoking. I burn my tongue with instant noodles.

This roof terrace circles the perimeter of our building, offering a 360 degree view of London’s flat and scattered skyline which is amazing, yes, but if you zoom in to its individual components its really quite ugly. I adore it. It is where my days begin and end, cycling through hours and weeks with contemplative restoration and empty bliss. In a timely affair what with the recent arrival of spring and the new astrological year, circles and cycles seem to have become the theme of late. Like a morning coffee, positive changes put in place have ushered in waves of relief and cleared the way for the new and the unknown. There is energy and inspiration, and it is to the roof that I take myself to reflect on this time. I’m entering a new cycle… of something. Breaking out of the old, skin sheds and crystallises into corpsehood.

Its Tuesday today. This is usually the start of my working week and the morning after my rock, India, and I go for a kebab. Today, however, is my first day of unemployment and India has just moved to Canada. She chose to move and I chose to leave my job - easy decisions to make but each, for me, difficult realities to digest (the former far more so). I wonder if I will feel slightly sad staring at the raw hide of the night sky tonight, sat up there earlier than usual because I won’t have had to run to catch the last Eastbound Hammersmith & City line from Westbourne Park, my stomach rumbling with the absence of the delights of Monday nights shared with my “fellow gourmande”.

In this time of transition, I’ve noticed that many old patterns, thoughts and habits have arisen - some to learn from and others to learn to leave. Oftentimes I’m met with an image of a giant picking up the bottom of the ocean and bringing it to the surface as one immense wave. Eventually it reaches the shore and the waters calm and what was dredged up either washes ashore or is cloaked back under the invisibility of the seabed. But whilst this all reaches its apex, its quite an overwhelming feeling. When finally the wave breaks, there is a sense of release, and I think thats what this period of change has been very marked by. A lot of letting go. In turn there is now the space to fill with something new, even if its the acknowledgement of something that was once there. The time of transition is far from being void, but where similar moments past have been replete with “newness”, this one is decidedly marked by how much “old” is finally being letting go of and the space that opens up. The roof, in all its windswept splendour, has been the shore where the waters of day deliver me each night, each the sum of every one past.

In some ways, these endings and changes feel like porters of silence. Or that they’re turning the volume down. Luckily it isn’t the loss of sound altogether and sometimes in seeking silence we finally start to hear what we need to. Ironically (and unsurprisingly), the roof is never that quiet. Be it the sirens that puncture London’s soundscape or music in my headphones, the sonic world is spectacularly full up there. As I am writing, SAULT’s Wildfires is playing and I am hit with a twinge of happy melancholy as this was one of the songs I went through a phase of singing (poorly) at work. Memory replaces reality, lyrics relieve the sound of silence, and nothing more than an auditory map of the city sprawls in front of me, newly empty streets awaiting construction.

I associate roofs with solitude. I think they’re best served alone.

The roof offers a unique perfective; this feeling of merging with both magnitude and minuteness and that everything at one point comes full circle. It surveys totality, gently, without judgement or expectation. On your roof, you are the eyes of TJ Eckleberg. Ever observing, ever listening. To begin and end my days perched high above narrow Whitechapel streets feels symbolic. Revolution of the daily wheel. At a time so marked by the ending of cycles and the beginning of new ones, is only fit that these last few words are typed on the roof where the rain is falling haphazardly behind me and my first full day of this new cycle comes to a close. In a way everything feels completely different and it all feels the same. At the end of the day, a roof is a roof is a roof.