The second floor of the Old Academic Block is my favourite spot in Krea. From there, life feels close enough to touch, and at the same time, distant enough to remain untouchable. You see people laughing, walking in pairs. Or maybe it’s night, and a boy just asked the girl he likes for a walk — a walk shadowed by the tension of how long their friendship will last. Or maybe it’s someone who’s walking alone. Maybe talking to someone on their phone, telling them about their day. Or maybe someone is just having a bad day, and they wanted to take a walk to clear their mind.
The second floor of the academic building is where I go when I don’t want to be myself for some time. The second floor is perfect, because it isn’t too close for people to notice me noticing them. Nor is it too far where faces and voices become obscured and blurred. I get to be in conversations I normally would never even dream of being in. Not as an active participant, but a passive listener. Maybe I’ll laugh at the joke a group made, or smile knowing that something good happened to someone. But there is a fine line that I draw for myself every day when I lean out of that window on the second floor. Maybe I’m invading a private, intimate moment? Or maybe I’m a part of something I really shouldn’t be, even from that far. But maybe the distance makes me distance myself from the morality of the act.Â
 The academic building was never built to be empty. It was made so that the sounds of frustrated students cussing at an assignment overlap the “thank you, boss” that the UPI machine makes at Narsis. It was built for noise, for movement, and for constant activity. But at night? Maybe it’s the air, or the blinding ceiling white lights, that make it such a liminal space. Sound travels differently at night; you hear nothing inside. But the walls reverberate with the conversations happening outside. And the second floor provides the perfect platform for it. You’re neither in a generally loud and busy academic block nor a part of the action happening outside, and I feel like I’m suspended in between realities. The rather dim lighting in the corridor with the windows offers me no distractions, and voluntarily or involuntarily, my focus is on what is unfolding underneath me on the road.Â
The second floor lets me be part of someone else’s day, their connections, achievements, and their failures. It lets me touch the edges of people’s lives without ever asking to be let in. Maybe that’s why I keep returning: because it is easier to witness connection than risk seeking it out. Maybe the reason I like the second floor is because it mimics me. The second floor feels like me: never fully part of the action, but never completely apart from it either. Listening from those windows, I realised the many shapes a life can take. Joy, tension, loneliness, relief. In those bits and pieces, I sometimes find my own reflection. The second floor frees me from the performance of being myself. From up there, I don’t have to speak, explain, or prove myself. I can just exist, quietly, in the company of strangers who don’t even know I’m cosplaying as one of them.
Above all, it’s where I can escape myself. The second floor is not just a corridor in the Academic Block. It is a threshold, a safe space. And perhaps that is why I keep returning. Because, in standing on that threshold, I feel closest to who I am when I am no one at all.