A Case Against the Sky
i had a phase where i started taking pictures of the sky. at first, i didn’t realize what i was doing bcs im not really a “sky person”. on the outside, it seemed normal to see a person taking picture of the sky, bcs ofc look at it it’s beautiful. but i know deep inside it was not from adoration, i was so mad of it. i would take pictures with vindication in my heart bcs to me, at that time, it felt like a mockery. so obnoxiously loud and garish, and,
like can you shut the fuck up…
ofc i was not angry angry at the sky. i am though at my god. how can u show me something beautiful when i am here suffering. how can you continue to create that feels like heaven on earth when ur child is suffering. it felt like, every beautiful sky was out to get me, bcs in the most debilitating time of my life, it is there, mocking me. look how beautiful everything is, and look how little it matters that u are breaking.
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bcs i had been driven by a desperate, and almost pathological need to document the gap. every picture i took was an attempt to pin down that abandonment. i wanted so bad to document the gap between the perfection above and the wreckage below as if it would make my case of his abandonment. a strong evidence that would, surely, force god to acknowledge the contradiction. i believed that if i could just show him the disparity clearly enough, if i could prove how obscene the beauty looked when placed against my suffering, it would somehow validate my pain. i thought that by documenting the gap, i could force him to close it.
it was a strange ritual really, considering i was never fond of skies to begin with. my nature has always been toward the grounded solid reality of the tangible certainty of earth beneath my feet. i prefer things i can touch, things that exist at eye level, things that are rooted in something that exist with me and certainly not above me. but during that time, i couldn’t stop looking up. i was compelled to document the very thing that repelled me.
now, looking back at these images, i realize the most terrifying part wasn’t that the sky was mocking me. it was that it wasn’t doing anything at all. my anger had assumed a level of attention that wasn’t actually there. i had spent months trying to build a case of abandonment against a defendant who wasn’t even in the courtroom. these pictures aren’t evidence of a conspiracy. they are just pictures of something that doesn’t care if i live or die. the sky doesn’t hate me, it doesn’t even know me. i have learned to stop looking up. i have returned to the earth, to the plants and the dirt to things that at least exist in the same reality as i do. the sky remains above, perfect and empty, and i have finally accepted that its beauty is not a gift, but a symptom of its absolute silence.
