Dear Yuri,
These are some things I can see from my window. These are some things I don’t understand. Some things I do.
I live in Mile End, London. From my living room window, I can see the very tip of The Shard, a skyscraper. Which is a lovely word, though there is hubris in it, too. It makes me think of the photo taken in New York, 1932: Lunch atop a Skyscraper. I don’t understand how those workers aren’t full of the fear of falling, as they perch on a crossbeam in the sky.
Even closer to my window I see a tower block, in one of the windows facing mine, a person doing star jumps. I wonder if they watch me doing Joe Wicks in the afternoon. Both of us jumping up and down. Neither of us thinking, in that moment, how we exist on a planet in a solar system in a universe in– it’s hard to be existential, when you’re sweating your arse off.
I don’t understand even the basic science behind the biology of what a virus is or isn’t. I got an F in GSCE Biology at school. But I do understand fear. I know where it lives in the body.
I don’t understand cancer, but I know my mother has it. I know that sometimes she is chock-full of fear, like a trapeze artist who shouldn’t look down, but does. I know that other times, she is stuffed full of joy, just like Philippe Petite, as he balanced on his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York, 1974.
“I will carry my life across the wire, as you must do with your life.”
Here’s one thing I know.
It is, and has always been, a tightrope.
Walk on, my dear ones, walk on.