After all, airspace can be invaded, as can land and sea. God forbid you see an unauthorized Russian jet swoop over New Orleans. Shots will be fired.
Of course, as soon as you decide to divide up and name the skies, it gets a bit complicated. How do you set up boundaries in the sky? Would you draw imaginary lines straight up from the ground border? It’s silly, you might say, to divide up skies. What’s the use? We all see the same sky, breathe the same air. Imagining lines in the sky is just stupid. Well, if we continue on that vein, I think imagining a line dividing seas is kind of stupid. Are Pacific waters any bluer than the Atlantic? Will it increase the fish in the sea if it’s called East Sea, as opposed to East China Sea? Of course, then, we’ve moved into a question of territory and historical tensions. Of all the vigilant territorial animals out there, humans are the only ones who create imaginary territory. Hypothetical boundaries, that they’ll never physically need but will snarl if someone crosses it.
The Irish Sky. Jamaican Sky. Malaysian Sky. American, with bald eagles flying through it. Swiss skies, the Alpine peaks piercing the blue. We can take this further, break it down even more. Californian skies will be perpetually sunny and Georgian skies might be peach-scented. Keep going—the Sacramento Sky. Atlanta Sky. Across the globe: the Beijing Sky. Manila Sky. Roman Sky, which sounds absolutely majestic. Toronto Sky, with the CN Tower poking its sharp nose into it. Los Angeles and New York skies, currently orange with pollution—Manhattan Sky, also lots of smoke. SoHo and Lower East Side folks might start arguing for possession of more sky. Soon, everyone will have their own chunk of sky, a little circular area formed by ascending in two straight lines starting from the shoulders. That’s your sky—call it anything you want.
The problem with these personal skies is that they’re mobile. They move with you, and then there’s the question of what happens when you go indoors. Is the chatty coworker in their office on the second floor technically invading your sky? What about an apartment building? Are all five hundred tenants suddenly sharing the same 70 sqft or so of sky? When a boy becomes a man, head and shoulders enlarging, is he naturally earning himself more sky than those with narrower shoulders? If your hips are wider than your shoulders, shouldn’t that be what sets the boundaries of your sky instead? How is that fair? And now when you say someone’s looking over your shoulder, invading your personal space, you mean it literally. And finally, there’s one thing that will collapse it all, annihilate all principles of personal territory, throw all of this into oblivion: piggyback rides.
Suddenly you share a sky. When you’re on your loved one’s shoulders, or vice versa, your skies overlap, but you don’t mind. You don’t mind when your skies merge into each other’s. Suddenly it’s all very simple, this territory game. Boundaries have been crossed and here you are, unscathed. Did you really need that little fragment of sky in the first place? Pahóm needed six feet of land in which to lay his body. How much sky does a person need?
Enough to gaze at, enough to reach up toward—enough to point out planes that arc away, to watch it darken and a moon rise. Enough to laugh beneath as you sit on someone’s shoulders, happy that you’re under the same great unnamed sky. One shared sky is good enough for us.
