I’m tired of living in the ordinary. Living between the gray and flat builds in tiresome. I’m sick of walking among the mundane lifeless people around me called neighbors. I need a change, a shift, and an out of this world experience to bring some color and vibrancy to my plateau-ing life. I don’t need much. Just a small shift. I think I would like to walk on walls. Like Tricia Brown’s dancers who frolicked so easily, I would like to see my world at different levels.

When I get up out of bed, instead of taking the stairs or elevator to the bottom floor of my apartment building, I’ll just walk out of my window and down the side of the building. It’s still the commonplace action of walking, placing one foot in front of the other; only it would be done on he side of a building. The crowds would gaze up at me though and stare in wonder and awe. To them it’s magical, glorious, and perhaps insane. For me its taking a simple, minimal, and unexciting action and just transposing it to a new found location. It’s just the same dull, repetitive routine we all know very well performed at literally new heights.
The perspective I’m getting from walking down the side of a wall is interesting. When I walk down the side of the building I see the people below me looking up as if they were the ones oriented the wrong the way. I feel like I’m walking into the hustle and bustle of the city. Instead of being a part of the middle class crowd that has nothing better to do than among amongst them, my walk on walls has allowed me to take on a new perspective and observe them without necessarily participating with them. I hope I do not fall down to them. That would hurt a lot, if I did then I would hate gravity greatly.

I wonder if what I’m doing is illegal. There is no way I can take my walk and go unnoticed. Am I trespassing? Technically no because I’m merely trotting along the surface of a structure, but since I am trotting along the side of the building is someone going to call me out? Because my view includes a viewpoint that no one else but the birds can see? Or because I’m performing a typical action in a non-typical way? I will surely stir up a commotion.

In a sense my conventional routine of walking performed in nonconventional way has the same effect upon my neighbors below. From the perspective of the side of the building I can see what is really going on. The typical actions of walking across the street, navigating a car, and even buying fruit from one the street vendors take a lot of coordination. In the same way that my neighbors gawk over my walking, and me I fixated my eyes over them.

--Melissa Lee