XXV. The Men Who Built the Sky.

Mine was the view no one wanted: a raw-boned skeleton of concrete and steel. A form groaning to life every morning before the sun could catch it in the act, rising not with grace but with the clumsy insistence of something newly resolved to exist. A cage? A cathedral? I wasn’t quite sure what it meant to be. At night, it glared through my window with a single floodlight eye, bright, unwavering, a little desperate. An unwanted sentinel, washing my walls in a tired, clinical white. I slept fitfully beneath its gaze, as if my body were under interrogation.

I cursed it often. Even so, discomfort has a way of fading. I grew used to its presence. And then, one night—a small, uneventful night—I stopped resisting. I began to call it my moon. Not a poet’s moon, no. A mechanical one: too faithful to ignore, too bright to love. Unfeeling, but there all the same. And that mattered. In those days, even unwelcome company felt like a kind of mercy, intimate in its fidelity.

By morning, the site would stir: ribs of steel, staircases ending in air, a crane drifting sideways as if it had somewhere else to be. I found it almost noble in its confusion. Aimless in parts, overcommitted in others, advancing not with vision but with sheer volume. It had none of the beauty unfinished things sometimes hold, just the awkward certainty of a body learning how to stand. Still, it continued. And I respected that: scaffolds leaning in uncertain directions, the structure becoming something it couldn't yet name.

I watched it every morning. If I was harsh in my judgment, it was only because I recognized the effort. I wanted to see what it would become. Maybe just to see if it ever would.

The men arrived early. Helmet lights bloomed along the spine of the tower: fireflies in formation, climbing into the cold. They moved with the certainty of ritual, disappearing into stairwells unfinished, or into the exterior lift that crawled along the side like a slow breath rising.

The crane operator was my favourite child. Always alone, always the one I traced slowly to the top. He climbed with solemn gravity, his ascent so steady it bordered on sacred. Clip, unclip, clip again. His harness brushing against steel. He climbed not as a man on the clock, but as a pilgrim, offering himself up to the sky. From my window, he seemed unreasonably brave. Utterly devoted to the act of rising.

As the sky turned its first pale blue, the crane would begin to move, hoisting great panes of glass into the air, swinging gently, bearing the blurred reflection of a city still dreaming.

Inside, my room was stagnant. Silence grew thick between the walls. I was unwell, though I did not speak of it, not even to myself. The world collapsed into two dimensions: hunger and sleep, each swinging between too much and not enough. Dishes lay untouched, the closet door hanging open like a mouth too tired to close.

I cannot say when I began to open the blinds again. Only that the men came first. And then, one morning, I followed. I opened the window. Let the old air stumble out. Stepped onto the balcony, barefoot, half-alive. A pigeon startled from the railing, scattering wings and dust into the air. Then it was gone. The city exhaled. And I, grudging and grateful, rose to meet it.

I learned their habits. There was the one who smoked by the ledge. The pair who argued about hockey as if time itself were keeping score. The crane operator, who never spoke, at least not that I could hear. He seemed like someone who knew better than to say more than was needed.

By mid-morning, the world thickened. The clatter of steel. Orders shouted and obeyed. Pallets dropping like punctuation. Clangs and bangs. Then bangs, then clangs.

Above it all, the children.

An elementary school sat just behind the site, and when the recess bell rang, the yard filled with the shrieking frenzy of a flock wilder than birds. They sprinted, launched basketballs not toward nets but at each other’s heads. When it rained, they ran harder, arms flailing, their screams indistinguishable from laughter, as if panic were just another name for joy.

Once, I laughed. I don’t recall what prompted it, only that I was standing in the kitchen, hands wrapped around a chipped mug, when the sound escaped me. And across the way, so were they. The men. Laughing too, at the same scene: children bursting beneath a sky too vast to scold, too distant to praise.

For a moment, we were joined. Not as friends, or as strangers, but as witnesses. And witnessing, I realized, is its own form of belonging. A silent membership to the same morning. A shared respect for something fleeting and alive.

Sometimes I passed the site on foot, returning from the store, arms full of lemons and rice, a carton of milk sweating through the thin reusable bag. Some of the men stood by the gate, shoulders heavy, coffee steaming in their thermoses, faces softened by exhaustion. I wanted to speak to them, more than I knew how to admit. To say good morning. To say I see you. To say thank you.

Up close, their faces looked different. Less mythic. More breakable. Human. Like men who could ask for cigarettes—or turn me into a crude passing comment. Or decide, with barely a glance, that I wasn’t worth talking to. So, I walked past. Silent. Unsure if my reverence could ever translate into words.

The building grew. Glass stacked over glass. One floor, then the next. And with each addition, the wind passed through it less. The daily clamour dulled behind drywall.

The operator must have climbed down for the last time. I didn’t see it happen. I imagine he descended with the same gravity he always carried: folding himself back into the city. No fanfare. Just a man who once offered himself up to the sky, then returned to the earth. I never learned how they got the crane down. I wish I had seen the end begin.

I missed the scaffolding. The living soul of the incomplete.

Sometimes I wondered if this was how the ancients felt, watching pyramids rise from sand, watching temples emerge one column at a time. That strange affair with something not yours, yet stirring a part that answers to you. The beauty of a thing as it becomes. The faint sting of knowing it will outlast you.

At some nameless hour, the floodlight blinked its last. The building stood aloof. A condominium like all the others. No one marked the moment. The city swallowed it whole.

But I remembered.

The smoker. The men who bickered like brothers. The operator in his silent tower. The sound of children echoing through steel. The first time I opened the blinds. The chipped mug. The taste of air not mine but shared.

They didn’t save me.

Not in the way people mean when they say that.

They gave me back the morning.

A reason to rise.

To let the light in.

And that, perhaps, is how the soul survives.

Not through grand salvation,

but through proximity to persistence.

Through the quiet miracle

of watching someone else

climb.

For what it’s worth,

-Charlene Iris

One thought at a time.

One truth at a time. 

Because some epiphanies stay with you.