the library above raw concrete

i watched the brutalist again for a stupid reason.

a reels about the film passed through my facebook feed, and because i had nothing better to do

, i opened it again. not because i wanted to study architecture. not because i wanted to become the kind of person who says clever things about cinema. not because i was searching for anything.

i was only bored.

but sometimes boredom is a strange door.

when the library scene appeared, i stopped. the room was cold, severe, and almost religious. it did not try to comfort anyone. it did not ask to be loved. there was no warm decoration pretending to be kindness, no soft ornament trying to hide the weight of the material.

only silence, proportion, concrete, light, and a strange feeling that human beings could build a place that refused to console them, yet still made them want to stay.

and damn it, i knew that feeling.

i had seen that place before.

not in a museum. not in an architecture book. not on pinterest. not in the clean world of people whose lives look organized from a distance.

i had seen it above my own house.

for years, there had been an unfinished recognition in my head whenever i remembered that scene. something familiar, but not clear enough to name. the first time i watched the film, i felt it, then lost it. the feeling stayed somewhere behind my skull like dust on an object i had not touched in a long time.

only on the second watch did the pieces fall into place.

that library was not only a room in a film.

it was a language i found too late for the fourth-floor rooftop of my own house.

my house is not beautiful.

at least not in the normal sense. it is narrow, tall, and strange. it looks like a building forced to grow upward because it was never given enough space to breathe sideways. there is no wide yard. no gentle garden. no generous horizontal place where life can spread itself calmly, like in property advertisements.

the house climbs.

floor after floor.

like a stubborn answer to a limited piece of land.

my father built it before he left my life when i was still in kindergarten.

i hate writing that sentence.

not because i want to hide it. not because i am ashamed of it. but because the sentence always sounds larger than i want it to be, too ready to make people pity me, as if i were placing a wound on the table and waiting for someone to touch it gently.

i am not asking for pity.

but still, it is true.

he left.

the house stayed.

and i grew up inside something he had left behind.

there is something cruel about that. someone can disappear from your life, yet the shape of his decisions remains around you. in the walls. in the stairs. in the way one room leads to another. in the height of a building that keeps standing long after the person who made it is gone.

i did not know enough of him to understand him as a man.

but i lived inside his architecture.

maybe that is why the house never felt completely warm to me. it was not only a home. it was a remainder. a physical sentence left unfinished by someone who was no longer there to explain it.

and at the top of that remainder, there was a place that strangely felt the most mine.

to reach it, i had to climb through the bathroom window.

there was no noble entrance. no clean staircase leading to a private sanctuary. no cinematic door opening into a perfect quiet room. nothing dignified.

only a bathroom window.

i would push my body through it carefully, step out, and land on a narrow surface of raw concrete without a proper guardrail. one stupid movement, and the body remembers that gravity has no taste for poetry.

but maybe that was why it felt real.

up there, the house changed.

the noise from below became smaller. not gone, only lowered. the television, the voices, the domestic movement of people, the ordinary pressure of being seen, all of it fell several floors beneath me. my body was still in the same house, but my mind had stepped out of it.

there was only concrete.

raw concrete. grey concrete. hard concrete. hot in the afternoon, damp after rain, ugly in the most honest way.

and somehow, i loved it.

i used to sit there with my phone, reading pdfs from internet archive like a poor man building his own library from a cracked screen.

no shelves. no table. no chair. no yellow lamp making everything look intellectual and warm. no smell of old paper. no expensive aesthetic.

only a broken phone screen, digital books, and my body sitting on concrete like a stubborn creature refusing to go back down.

but to me, it was a library.

and i do not care if the definition is not official.

a library does not always need shelves. sometimes a library is only a place where the world becomes quiet enough for one sentence to enter your head and ruin you slowly.

there, i read.

there, i drew.

there, i stared at the sky for too long, until it felt as if the sky knew me better than most people ever did.

maybe that sounds excessive.

but, im indeed always excessive when i love something.

i loved that place because it was rough. because it did not pretend. because it did not polish itself into something acceptable. because it did not hide its defects. because it did not apologize for being hard.

there is something in brutalism that makes me feel understood. not because concrete is beautiful, but because concrete does not act.

concrete remains concrete.

weight remains weight.

a crack remains a crack.

and sometimes, i trust things that do not try too hard to look soft.

i drew there slowly, manually, foolishly. in an age where images can appear in seconds, i still sat above raw concrete and dragged lines across paper with my own hand. not because the result was always better. often, it was not. not because i wanted to be some pure anti-ai believer. i use ai too. i know the temptation of a machine that can turn language into images.

but there is something in a manual line that cannot be replaced.

not the result.

the time.

when a pencil moves, the body remains involved. a bad line does not vanish immediately. a mistake leaves evidence. the hand trembles, pressure changes, and the paper accepts every weakness without asking for an explanation.

ai makes an image appear.

a pencil makes time visible.

and maybe i needed that.

maybe i needed proof that i still had a body. that i could still do something slowly. that i had not completely become a head that thinks, chooses, clicks, waits for a result, then hates the result.

sometimes, when the afternoon clouds were good, i placed my phone somewhere and recorded a timelapse. i lowered the exposure until my body became a black silhouette. my face disappeared. my details disappeared. my identity disappeared.

i liked myself better that way.

only a small dark figure beneath a large sky.

not a name. not a history. not a child who was left behind. not a mind constantly trying to explain itself.

only sitting.

only dark.

only there.

and above me, the sky.

maybe that was why the place felt like a center.

not the center of the world. i am not that insane. but the center of my small world. the point where the disorder below, the strange house, the unfinished life, and all the things i could not name suddenly seemed to have direction.

the land was narrow, so the house went upward.

the house went upward, so my gaze was forced upward.

my gaze was forced upward, so the sky became the only exit.

that was cruel.

but it was beautiful.

i had no yard, so i took the sky.

i had no wide room, so i made width out of height.

i had no library, so i made raw concrete its floor.

i did not have many things, so i named the lack as space.

and for a while, the name worked.

until the neighbor began to build higher.

i know.

i know they did nothing wrong.

i know people have the right to build their own houses. i know life does not revolve around my small private feeling about the sky. i know nobody wakes up in the morning and says, let us destroy the personal mythology of the strange boy next door.

i know all of that.

and that is exactly why it makes me angrier.

because there is no clean enemy to hate.

only bricks rising little by little. cement. workers. construction noise. a wall growing slowly, unaware that it is closing a part of someone else's life.

at first, i only saw it.

then i began to feel it.

the sky that once arrived whole began to arrive in pieces.

the view that once moved upward freely began to hit a wall.

the place that once felt like a small exile became part of the neighborhood again. part of the outside world. part of ordinary life.

and i hated that more than i should have.

because what disappeared was not only a view.

what disappeared was the feeling that there was one place no one could touch.

one place where i could be the center without competing.

one place where the house left behind, with all its oddness, finally gave me something that felt like mine.

then the wall rose.

and i understood, again, that nothing truly belongs to us.

even the sky is only ours until someone builds high enough to cut it.

i can still go up there.

that is the most irritating part.

the place did not disappear completely. if it had disappeared, maybe grief would be easier. if it had been destroyed, i could mourn it clearly. if it had been sealed forever, i could say: finished.

but no.

the concrete is still there.

the bathroom window is still there.

i can still climb.

i can still sit.

i can still open a pdf.

i can still draw.

birds still pass sometimes. clouds still move as if nothing happened.

but the answer is different.

the same place does not always give the same feeling.

and that hurts more than dramatic loss.

because you stand there, seeing that everything is still present, and ask yourself why you can no longer feel it the way you once did.

maybe that is why i am writing this.

not to make the rooftop more beautiful than it was. not to turn raw concrete into a sacred temple. not to transform pain into a clean aesthetic. i do not want to lie. the place was sometimes hot, dirty, dangerous, and uncomfortable. perhaps to someone else, it was only an unfinished part of a house.

but to me, it was once a library.

a library without shelves.

without a chair.

without a door.

without anyone's permission.

only concrete, sky, a cracked phone, and someone trying to read himself through books he found on the internet.

i watched the brutalist and realized too late that i had lived with a room like that for years.

not grand.

not perfect.

only a rough place above a narrow house built by a father who left too early.

maybe that is why i loved it.

because the place was like me.

unfinished.

not clean.

not completely safe.

but still trying to become something.

now the sky is no longer whole.

and i still climb there.

maybe out of loyalty.

or maybe because i have always been too foolish to leave things just because they have changed.

— luca invictus