The city never stops building. Cranes against the sky, concrete rising floor by floor, windows that stare blankly into nowhere. We build and build, as if the next tower will finally hold everything together. But what are we building? Boxes for living. Cages for sleeping. Concrete honeycombs where we hide from each other.
Standing at the foot of a new construction site, I look up. The buildings lean toward me, their weight pressing down. They don’t see the sky anymore—they’ve become the sky. And in their shadow, I realize: the more we build, the more we disappear into what we’ve made.
I leave the city for the water, for the surface where the only thing above me is open air. Not to escape—I’ve stopped thinking in those terms. Just to see it from a distance. To understand its shape, its rhythm, its breath. From the lake, the skyline shrinks. The towers become lines on the horizon. The noise becomes a low hum. And I can finally see it for what it is: a construction site where we are all building, but forgetting what we’re building for.
Underwater, there is no construction. No concrete. No noise. Just breath, weightlessness, and the silence that the city can never give. Down there, I listen to what is missing: the absence of building, the absence of clamor. I think about how we build walls around ourselves—walls of silence, walls of things left unsaid.
Sometimes the hardest thing is not building. It’s waiting. It’s leaving a door open without knowing if anyone will walk through. It’s learning to sit with the silence and not fill it with more walls.
I surface. I sit on the SUP board, floating. The city is there, on the shore, breathing, never sleeping. I don’t turn away. I stay. I watch. I wait—not for an answer, but for the right moment when the silence becomes a door instead of a wall.
