I’m sitting by myself this evening, listening to music and looking out at the road from my sixth-floor balcony. It’s already dark, but the world is still busy. Cars coming and going, people getting off work, everyone heading somewhere. Sometimes I even catch myself calculating how long a car takes to reach the point where I can see it. I don’t know why. I just like watching.
I read somewhere once, do we want to be on top so we can see the world, or so the world can see us? I’ve always loved that thought. Maybe living this high up makes me think about it a little more.
At some point, I take my glasses off. My eyesight is pretty bad, so without them, the entire world turns into a blur. But I’ve always liked looking at things this way when I want to be alone. Everything loses its shape, and somehow, I find it beautiful.
Tonight, the road looks like someone has scattered glitter across it. Little specks of light in different colours, moving at different speeds. I can’t tell which ones belong to trucks or cars anymore. I can only see the colours, and for some reason, I can’t stop looking.
I wonder if I’ll ever want to get my eyesight completely fixed. Not because I don’t want to see things clearly, but because there’s a version of the world I get to see only when I take my glasses off. A version where everything familiar becomes something else entirely. And I think I’m a little attached to it.
There’s a moon rising right in front of me, and across the road, a single home in a huge building is decorated with little pink and blue Diwali lights. I keep looking at the lights, then at the moon, then back at the lights. The sky gets darker, and the moon somehow gets brighter. I don’t even realise how long I’ve been sitting here.
I think about this one evening at a fair with my love. We had just gotten off the Ferris wheel and were sitting together, watching it turn in front of us. For some reason, we both took our glasses off. His eyesight is even worse than mine, so we sat there, holding hands, looking at what was once a Ferris wheel but had now become nothing more than little specks of light circling endlessly against the night sky. We weren’t talking about anything profound. Nothing particularly extraordinary was happening. But I remember thinking how beautiful it was to finally have someone who could see the world the way I did. Someone who could look at the same blur of colours and find the same kind of beauty in it. It’s one of those moments I’ve quietly kept to myself, and I think I always will.
Lately, I’ve been so caught up in my own head, thinking about life, about what’s happening, what isn’t, and why everything feels so uncertain. But right now, I’m just sitting here, listening to a song, watching tiny lights move across a distant road, and smiling for no particular reason. I don’t have answers to the things I’ve been worrying about. Nothing has changed. I just feel nice.
Maybe that’s what makes this evening so special. There’s nothing extraordinary happening. The world is doing what it does every day. People are going home, cars are passing by, someone is putting up Diwali lights, and the moon is slowly becoming brighter. But I’m sitting here long enough to notice it all.
I keep thinking about how many little things I miss when I’m too busy thinking about everything else.
And as I’m writing this, the moon is finally at its brightest, right in front of me, and it’s so fucking beautiful. I genuinely can’t explain it. I just keep looking at it, and I don’t want to look away.
I don’t know. I just feel a lot of things tonight, and I want to remember what it feels like to sit here, doing nothing, and be this happy.