Under what weight does your ceiling bow?

If you would be so kind, imagine yourself to be lying on the floor of your living room. Or, should that prove too much discomfort, lain across your bed. Made or unmade, what is essential here is that you are on your back. Above you is a plain, white, plaster ceiling. In the plaster, are a number of cracks. Thin, hairline cracks. No cause for concern; but a certain degree of boredom, or conversely, an instance causing high stress, has led you to take interest in these cracks. Their shape. Their breadth. Their cause. Over weeks and months, you continue to resume this position; what you do in between these bouts of ceiling staring is of no importance, but over time the cracks lengthen. They grow deeper. There must be some bowing to the ceiling, or some minor subsidence occurring, although not enough to cause concern. But you wonder what it is the upstairs neighbour is doing to create these cracks. 

Who is this man upstairs? Well, we don’t know too much about him. A gentleman as they say, “of a certain age”. English, you’re fairly sure. You know him to look at. You’ve garnered some of his habits through sounds from above; When he leaves in the morning. When he enjoys his dinner. But besides these rather shallow observations, the upstairs neighbour is a mystery. It’s been far too long now since you moved in to strike up a relationship now of course, so you decide that if the answer to the cracks in the ceiling is rooted in your upstairs neighbour, the answer to the question of your upstairs neighbour, must be in the cracks. 

This habit, of staring upwards, that at first produced a strikingly terse response from the plaster above, takes on a more hermeneutic nature. To understand the cracks is to understand the man, and vice-versa. Routes begin to appear to you, the cracks forming a map. These routes slowly replace your own routes. In your mind, your journey to work, or to your local cafe, is replaced with a shimmying crack in the ceiling. This must be his map, the man upstairs that is. His daily ramblings, his understanding of our shared surroundings. Whatever state of extreme boredom, trauma, or healthy dose of both, led you to this state has become irrelevant, such is the persuasive nature of those damn cracks in the ceiling.