That 3rd Floor Window

A friend and I spent a lot of time in stairwell 2 this past semester, a handful of times every week, between first and second period, we’d take the time to stare out the window on the third floor, we plunged ourselves into the scattered portables and half torn down soccer field that really defined our community at Garneau. After a couple months of this, we decided that we’d start a journal of everything we saw, reflecting on the hedonism of our lives and the changing world around us. 

These small blurbs are still safe in the note app of my phone, and they’re quite frankly some of the silliest things I’ve written. They're things like: 

May 31st: we see the reflections of ourselves painted in the world, it's a pale imitation of our true selves but also a meaning as to why we are the only ones that matter and can control. 

And: 

June 11th: orange on the green field stands out. A minority can really be unique within a sea of others if they are unique, even if they are a small part, they might be the first things one notices. 

Maybe they are a testament to English teachers trying to find meaning in the meaningless, a sort of silent rebellion if you will. 

…

Throughout our time on that third floor window, we received a fair share of baffled stares, classmates that laughed, and more others whose silence expressed their thoughts about our sanity. 

Despite how stupid it kind of sounds, I looked forward to those moments of tranquility, and ironically, I think they were the moments that I felt most sane. 

Amidst this past year's highest of highs, and the even lower lows, that tradition, an inside joke we shared, gave me some really pure moments of unspoken laughter. I can still distinctly remember that day when we wrote about the stunningly high numberof red cars in our school parking lot, I can still precisely picture those orange pylons. At the same time, I can not remember a single thing about aneuploidies or which one of Saturn's moons has the most geological activity. 

I feel like that’s a little problematic, but it also just goes to paint how little some things mean, even though we seem to place so much value onto them. Maybe it was meaningless this entire time to remember the colours of those cars, instead of the colours of celestial objects, but those cars are what I remembered, whatever that means. 

These days, I don’t have a stairwell to climb, I don’t have a community to look down on, but in the meantime, my second floor window with a comforting view of my neighbourhood will suffice, because in the simplest way, our tradition was an escape from our hedonistic lives that engulfed us in the moments before and after; it was small, it was silly, but nevertheless meaningful, and something I’d like to hold on to. 

Thanks Ethan.