I took this picture while I was lying down on my rooftop earlier today. Why are there literal iron bars on my rooftop, you ask? Indonesians are all about protecting their properties. Tall fences around the house, spikes and actual glass shards on their walls to prevent people from climbing in, you name it. I wish I was kidding... Sometimes I think it's a little excessive, but then I remember sometime when I was in primary school, my household woke up to a mud-covered foot stamp on our wall that divided our backyard and an empty clearing. And then we heard that our next-door neighbor's car radio got stolen - yes, you got that right - possibly by the robber who climbed through our wall.  I know it all sounds made up, and the next-door neighbor's car radio sounds like a pretty specific item to steal. We didn't have a car back then so I guess that made us less of a target, but I guess they could've broken into our house and stolen our TV or something. But then I remembered that we had window grates...

Anyway, that wasn't the point of the picture. I was just looking up at the sky earlier today and I felt like I was in 2013 or something. It's interesting that with everything that's changing around us, like the rivers and the trees, it's the sky that never seems to change. And you get that it's not that I'm not acknowledging our disappearing ozone layers, right? Because besides that, the sky looks exactly the same to me as it was 10, 20 years ago. You could look at the sky today and be transported to a warm, sunny day in 2006. Your surroundings changed, the weather's changed a bit (thanks, climate change), you changed, but the sky still stared down on you the way it did 16 years ago. 

I felt something else in me as I looked up at the sky. I'm always surrounded by the hustles of the city, and then the four walls of my home especially during the pandemic. And what's ironic is that when I want to look at the one nature that's easily accessible from my home (the sky) the lame iron bars won't even let me do it properly. But I tried to imagine myself when I was 7 or 8, laying on the grass in my old garden, looking up at the (undisrupted) sky. What was I thinking then? Was I thinking about school? Friends? Or did my mind immediately empty the way it did when I stared at the sky earlier today? Is it possible that even after everything I've been through in life, that one thing about me didn't change after all? 

Either way, I feel like I owe a promise to myself to go out of this concrete jungle and feel the freshly mown grass beneath my feet again someday. That day just can't come soon enough...