I don’t know where to start about the rooftop adventures. It’s dangerous to be young and bored? I had the assignment to go visit a couple buildings on campus and take note of their architecture inside and out, down to where the bathrooms are where public access ended. I took every open door as an invitation and made it to some very strange parts of one particularly old building. I called my friend and we went ahead and explored one of the newest buildings around and found access to be very much open to the public. There was mischief, danger, and the feeling of a secret privilege that only we had to be where we never were intended to be.
When we came out the top, the landscape changed completely. The horizon suddenly appeared. Our world at school suddenly expanded from a block in every direction to the sky meeting the ground on every side but center city. Maybe it isn’t the spectacle of the enormity of the buildings that makes it catch the eye but the obscuring of the horizon there that does it. We were up above the lights and looking down on the tops of heads. I might have known before this, but people really don’t look up, ever. It could be raining tennis balls Even the strangest things don’t distract people from their 2-d world of left right forward back.
Eventually we had to explore more and higher buildings, documenting our adventures and starting to notice the impact it had on us beyond something (sort of) impressive to show girlfriends. “I could kill myself, it’s completely within my power at this moment, and that’s scary,” one friend said. “If I were two feet to my right, my life would be over.” Something about stealing the time and place to be above the city, getting blown all over by the thermals around the buildings, the face of death and beauty of a sunset- all at once- I couldn’t trade it away.
