Looking up is a thing I’ve always had to do to be heard. Everyone is a lot taller than me. Lately even more so. Sometimes it hurts the back of my neck, to talk with my head angled this way. Other people’s ears are a long way away so the tilting focuses my voice in the right direction – earwards. Nowadays, bending my head back also helps hide my thinning hair from the people above me, who seem to have a lot more than me. From the front at least.

I look it up – hair loss. Menopause, it says. A lack of oestrogen. Ah. And light, brittle bones and osteopeania and osteoporosis and crumbling disks. By now I should be bent double. Maybe always looking up has stopped me curving right over forwards to touch the pavement.

Tiny mama, said the boys when they were little. Tiny mama. How did they know when they were only two feet tall themselves? Tiny mama. Now they are so tall I can see the underside of their beardy chins – red, curly, bristling. From up there they can’t see under mine, salt and pepper hairs sprouting. But they get a spectacular view of my moustache. That’s oestrogen too, a lack of it. Sometimes, they lift me up to their eye level and we laugh as I dangle helplessly. If other people pick me up, I get very angry. Someone once carried me round a pub over his shoulder, without asking, just picked me up like a doll. Everyone looked up at me then.

Today, looking up I saw

…a solitary airplane and a pink balloon on a collision course in an empty sky. Gone are the days of six planes at a time funneling from all corners of the sky into Heathrow, or Concorde’s four o’clock daily run, big silver bird with nosey bendy, ripping up the sky. Boom!;

…a magpie and a crow on the roof tops, ready for a punch up, bouncing around each other on grey slate tiles. Before landscape gardening and kitchen extensions they lived in our back gardens. Now they fight for the rim of a terracotta chimney pot. Their rage drills up and down the street;

…a bicycle tyre still hanging high in a tree on the pavement opposite, year in year out, hidden in among the rowan berries;

…a pall of yellow pollution hanging over Canary Wharf;

…a red ball come flying over the school wall, and then a small face, then a bigger face. I threw it back but it fell short of the wall and rolled away down the road;

…a cast iron crown on the top of a stink pipe. There are a lot of stink pipes round here, beautiful greens and greys and peeling rust, flutes from the sewers under our feet, the flatulent city breaking wind above us;

…a wood pigeon and a squirrel duffing each other up in my olive tree, racing away with purple olives. They have almost stripped it bare;

…a lot of crumbling brickwork on my own house. I need to do the pointing. The house and I seem to be running out of oestrogen together.

Once, when I was looking up I saw

…the man who lived over the road climbing out of the loft window. His wife was behind him, pulling him back in, crying and shouting ‘Don’t jump’;

…a man up a ladder pollarding a huge London Plane, working his way gently around one solitary nest, chopping the tree back to knuckles, leaving the little twig nursery cocooned in leaves, round and soft like a pompom in a bag of bones;

…a man fall from a crane on a long piece of rope. He came tumbling down from way above me. I screamed as he disappeared below the houses and the rope went taught. And then he just bounced back up. I didn’t know they did bungee jumping off cranes at London Bridge;

…the water dripping from behind the ceiling rose, right through the middle into the light fitting, just before the whole ceiling came down;

…the couple in the house next door, fucking on the dinner table. I looked away, really fast, pretending there was something interesting in the sky, Concorde maybe, or a balloon. I didn’t move for a long time in case they looked up and saw me;

…Elon Musk’s satellites as they bled into space in a ring of beads round the earth, only that’s not what I saw. I just saw one. It popped into view and then out again, the rest all hidden by city light.

If I look up

…at the ceiling from on my back on the floor, I get an idea of how big my house would be if I decluttered and put all the lights on sticks on the floor. A huge white garden of light bulb flowers;

…at the vine in the back garden I can see that I need to cut back the branches before winter comes. If I look down again, then maybe I won’t have to, but I’m too slow, so now I will have to go and get the loppers;

…from the dentist’s chair, I can see straight up her nose. Generally, I see up a lot of people’s noses, that’s just the way it is from down here. My teeth, though, don’t seem to have suffered like my bones from the lack of oestrogen so I never have to spend long with this view;

…I might see a mackerel sky. A real one, the whole sky shimmering. Sometimes the sky round here is all fish skin and sea, just how I like it;

…at the sky from on my back at the top of the hill, where the view is widest, I think I could still cloud burst. Remember that? When we thought we could change things just by wishing it. Which we could when we were hippies. Not really the clouds though. Just ourselves. Most of those hippies ended up rich. How did I not manage to do that too?

…at the sky from the top of the hill where the whole neighbourhood is gathered, singing Auld Lang Syne, I can see fireworks punching holes in the dark over London, but only if I stand at the front of the crowd. I get here early every year to make sure I can. Boudicca stood up here once. She probably stood at the front too, for different reasons.

Lately I have found that looking up

…old friends in a handwritten phone book is tragic, so many names crossed out;

…I can’t reach the top of Christmas tree anymore. Who will put the star up now?

…very slowly makes you feel like you’re in one of those films where you just don’t know what’s going to happen next, but you know it’s not going to be good;

…from under deep water is not as terrifying as it used to be. Quite peaceful in fact. The air in my bones mean I can sink no further. Things are looking up.

#52writingcards