You Could Feel The Sky...

The living room in the flat is small but it lets in a lot of light, about a quarter of the wall surface gives out to a large corner bay window – the benefits of tenements. I’ve sat here for most of the day watching the sky change, it started out clear and even, no clouds, serene, warm, static, save for the odd grumble of an engine or a door banging shut.

It’s afternoon now and things have changed. I hear gulls squawking as they fight for scraps of food on the melting tarmac, children laughing, frequent traffic on the roads and arguments in the street. I’ve changed too, I’ve moved from my morning seat on the sofa to the chair at my desk by the window.

I watch people of all nationalities, although usually under-represented minorities enter and leave the immigration centre opposite my building. From my citadel, I try to give them features, notice what they’re wearing, some distinguishing mark that will allow me to recognise them when they leave again. I remember a black guy entering this morning, he was wearing a jacket the colour of the pink chrysanthemums that used to grow in the garden of my parent’s house, he never came back out again – sometimes they don’t.

The place is a flurry of activity, there are always people coming and going, security guards closing gates, secretaries going for lunch and gossiping smokers loitering in the heat. I’m too high up to hear their conversations and at this distance lip reading is impossible, I don’t have the guile or imagination left in me to invent the hypothetical conversations they could be having.

The three Immigration buildings themselves are indistinct in their mediocrity, low and flat like military tents, aside from what looks like a guard tower jutting from the top of each. I have never seen anyone inside any of these towers, despite the fact that they are glass surrounds, they exist to establish the notion of diligence – nothing else.

In the background the spires of the Science Centre and the University point to the flux of sky ironically. The ancient building developed to increase our understanding of the world, the universe and culture, the other designed as a monument to Glasgow as a place of culture and diversity. The notion of the goodness of either disperses as my focus returns to the squat buildings in front of my flat, modern and brazen on the bank of a river that sent a million Scottish immigrants to the New World.

I have to stop thinking about it because it doesn’t do me any good.

I return my attention to the sky and watch a front of sluggish clouds work their way up the Clyde Valley towards the city. The sky: always shifting, always transitory, always forgetting; The clouds are melting, slowly, darkly, deeply in the pale azure of the sky, blown and disintegrating before my eyes, I have no idea where they’ll end up.