TBT #67: Appreciating Your Skylight

We have a skylight in our hallway and I’m not exactly sure what to do about that. I mean, I appreciate it, as that’s what you’re supposed to do with skylights. They are to be appreciated. Everyone seems to want one and whenever you go into someone’s house and find that they have a skylight, you’re supposed to look up and point and maybe say “Wow, a skylight.” And that’s just what I did when I first saw the skylight in the hallway. I looked up and I pointed.

Wow, a skylight.

But it doesn’t do anything, and these days I often forget that I even have a skylight most of the time. Admittedly, our skylight is awkwardly situated. It’s in the hallway. We don’t often sit, stand or even pause in hallways. They exist as transitions to other rooms, and are not considered rooms themselves despite the fact that you could probably live quite comfortably in a hallway if you really wanted to. So my interaction with the skylight is limited to walking underneath it which, you can imagine, isn’t very spectacular. Sometimes I start to wonder if skylights are really anything special. When you think about it, are they anything more than a window in your ceiling? One that you wouldn’t be able to look out of if you were, for whatever reason, incapable of moving your neck upwards?

But that sort of thinking just makes me feel bad. Surely I’m just doing something wrong with our skylight. Surely they must be special because why else would everyone want one? It doesn’t make sense to me and I often resolve myself to better appreciate the skylight in the future. I can’t make it work, though. Always, memories of the skylight fade and I’ll walk through the hallway without looking up.

I didn’t kiss her at the airport like I used to. I knew she probably would have liked that but I’ve realized over the years that public displays off affection are not as fun or as easy to ignore for bystanders as one might think. So I resisted. I resisted as we hunted the parking garage for my car that I had lost, and I resisted as she lay back in the passenger seat and listened to early morning radio on the way to the hotel. Then I regretted my resistance as we navigated the streets of Toronto and almost got lost, and pulled into a parking garage that required a nearly impossible left turn. But we made it and we yawned and stretched and checked-in quickly.

In the elevator, going up to our floor, I took her into my arms and we finally kissed. And then we kissed some more. The kind of kiss that’s been built-up for months and months, and then delivers on all its promise. The doors opened to our floor, but before we could stop they had closed and the elevator was going down. Before we knew it, we were back in the lobby, right where we started. The people working at the front desk were smiling at us.

I told her later about a time that had stuck with me. When we were both in Halifax one night, we were walking down Spring Garden and happened to pass a pan-handling woman. Which is, as most of you know, not an uncommon thing. She did what pan-handlers do and asked if we had any change, and I lied and said I didn’t, and we passed by as we normally would, thinking nothing of it. But then the woman called out, as we moved out of earshot. “God bless,” she said. “You look great together.”

I looked down at her hand in mine and realized that maybe we did.

She left Toronto unceremoniously and as I drove home I thought about our goodbyes. This was the seventh goodbye. And I thought about all the things I’ve felt, over those seven goodbyes, from sadness to relief to hope to loss. Everything from tears near the runway at Vancouver International to a quick look back near the security gate in Halifax. And it was almost too much to hold in my mind at once. So I turned the radio up and began to sing, as I often do, and drove down a Saturday evening highway towards home.

Later that summer I felt like my world was falling apart and so I called her. And it wasn’t until later that week that I realized exactly what it meant to have someone you could call when it feels like everything is going bad. It didn’t seem like some heroic act for her, and for me it was as natural as anything, but it represented the combined total of seven goodbyes, and all the time in between. It was the combined history of two people who had grown together and grown apart, experienced highs and experienced lows, but had never gone too far from one another. And that can’t mean nothing, I thought, with the phone against my ear. And so I let myself go and we talked and laughed and worried and wondered together until it got very deep into the night.

I doubt I’ll always remember what’s above me as I walk through the hall. But there will always be moments when I pause there, and think about where I stand, beneath the afternoon sun or an expanse of darkness, beneath falling rain or drifting snow, or an expanse of orange in the early morning that indicates that, yes, I need to be in bed. And it is those moments that matter. They are the moments that will move me, as I walk through other hallways and other lives, to appreciate my skylight and everything it brings.

Matt
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