There’s just something about the way I feel sitting on my roof. It’s the closest I ever come to thinking about nothing. My eyes just follow the birds as they fly back and forth, as my fingers trace tiny circles over the shingles. It’s less work up there, being, I mean. I don’t have to talk, or be pleasant, or plan, or worry or second guess myself. Everything is just natural. What I touch, smell, see, hear and feel just is, and drifts slowly by.

It really is my roof, too. It’s not the one that covers my house, but only the sun room, which juts out of my house. The only window leading out to it is from my room. It’s all so perfect; the window is just tall enough, the roof is slightly slanted, and my window is huge. It was meant to be.

But of course, I’m not really allowed there. I say really because I’m pretty sure they know the roof’s my favorite place, but if I was caught out there I’d probably be in trouble. One night when they were out, I slid the screen off the window and tossed to the ground. I was going to bury it or hide it between the spare mattresses in my garage, but it was bigger than I anticipated, so I shimmied it back up onto the roof, and just left it there. My dad still thinks it blew out in the storm. It took a little elbow grease, but a couple hours of work is nothing for that peace and calm you feel when you’re finally up there. You barely remember the work, and all you want to do is just sit and feel. And now nothing and nobody can keep me from my bliss.

The constancy of my roof is what’s reassuring. When bad things happen, when things go wrong, when I start to think my world is slowly crumbling, my roof shows me that it’s not. I watch the sunset as often as I can on my roof, and know that it happens everyday, and that without fail, it will rise again. My roof, my sunset, my sunrise, they help me understand that every time something went wrong for me, no matter how terrible, the sun continued to rise and set. It reminds me that my world isn’t the world, and that there’s a world right outside my bedroom window that is so much bigger than me, and that’s so good and so beautiful without even thinking, or trying to be, because it just is.

And even better than all that, it reminds me that I’m not, and never will be, alone. Everything that I go through, someone else has gone through too. Someone out there knows what I’m dealing with and understands. Someone out there has made it through it. And, whether it’s a million miles away or just a couple houses over, there’s always a girl sitting on her roof, watching sun, feeling the same thing I do.