The first in a mini series I've started where, on a day usually devoid of motivation or inspiration, I find something anything to connect with and write about.
Dear ceilings,
You’ve come to represent a lot in our time and for one of the three basic requirements of survival (food, water and shelter) you seem to be one of the original band members that everyone forgets.
When we think of you now we might think of that part of a house that doesn’t really do anything because we rarely see it, or rather choose to look at it - which in itself is a pretty damning but accurate representation of how we’ve only come to value what we choose to see rather than things with an unseeable value but that’s for another letter.
Over the last few decades you’ve been a pale wood chipped breeding ground for daydreams and subconscious thoughts, we see you less now we spend our boredom looking down at a screen rather than up at you and so that pastime where we’d let you look into our soul seems to be endangered. But many still remember your illuminated and legible Baroque and Rococo days where looking up to you meant looking up to Michelangelo's absorbed brushstrokes of the heavens, angels and the Gods in illusionist neck-fixating frescos. And yet you are still a metaphor for limit, the French verb ‘plafonner’ literally means ‘to ceiling’ associating you with being capped at a certain level. I know you are a protector not a restrictor, that’s why you’re a verb - we choose to ‘ceiling’ we have the power to limit ourselves and we choose how high that limit is - not you. And I do believe that if we looked up to you more in all senses of the term we’d go back to opening our minds not looking down and ‘ceiling’ them.
Your sincerely,
Sophiya.