When I was a child I imagined the distance between the roof of my house to the very place where the world curved out of view, which had to be imagined because the neighborhood houses squared out forever.
I don’t remember the first time I climbed the roof. It was a means of rising above it all: the streets, the other children in the neighborhood, the heat in the house, the life of the lower world.
It was a way of reaching up, also, of experimenting with flight, of getting up a little higher into the blueness of the tall sky, which had the width of all things round.
I would sit on the edge of the roof and watch the cars go by. I would sit on the peek of the house and look up.
As a small child I’d make a loop at the end of a rope and throw it over a pipe extending out of the roof of the garage. To reach the main house, I had to leap from the garage across a four foot span. Without making a sound, as my parents forbade climbing the roof.
There were stories of suicides. Accidents. Broken heads. Ladders slipping. Feet appearing into ceilings. Loose meteoroids, like bats, clipping chimneys. There was the story of bones in the attic. It went: some relative died; the body was put into the attic; that’s why the ceiling creaked at night.
Older, with a bigger wingspan, I climbed to the roof by pressing a palm to an exterior wall, the other to the adjacent neighbor’s, jumped up and pressed the soles of the feet to those same walls and shimmied up then grabbed the roof’s edge and pulled. Urban climbing. I’d visit friends by creeping roof to roof and slipping through a window.
Drivers on the street must’ve seen me the time I stood on the roof’s peek, a small boy on a house with a great thunder cloud coming. I must’ve heard those cars. Someone must have said puede caer and passed on. Podría caer y morir. O flotar. Caída. Me temo caer. Miedo a los relámpagos más de la caída . Maybe it was a woman in a red hat. It’s possible.
