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I did a writing. This is based on a question I saw this week in an exam paper, writing about a picture of a library with the sky painted on the ceiling. It's in the New York Public Library if you want to look it up. Anyway, I got inspired, and this is what came out of brain. Fun thing is, I have no idea where it will go next. Enjoy 👍 ----------- If you looked up, you could see the sky.  It’s one of the things I loved about this library.  The mural on the ceiling was of clouds in a bright blue sky.  The pompous arse who’d given the induction in week 2 had gone on about the artist as if I should have known who they were, and the reading room in the New York Public Library, which had a similar ceiling, as if I should have been familiar with it already.  I hadn’t known either of those things, but I studied here fairly regularly because of the ceiling.  There was some well-rehearsed story about the Dean of Whatever from years ago, who would tell you that in the right light from the right spot he could see an angel up there in the clouds.  That didn’t survive my bullshit-detector, but I liked how the ceiling looked and I liked how it made me feel.  There was hope in the blue stretches between the white fluffy clouds, and something in me responded to that. If I was at all romantically inclined, I would probably leave it at that, but my appreciation of this room and of the ceiling mural went beyond that.  It was an old building, part of an older university, and I got the sense that this room was built to both impress and exclude.  You see a lot of that around this city.  Impressive, with high ceilings, riven oak and named artists for the people on the inside, exclusive for everyone else.  When you come from where I come from, you learn how to spot where lines like that get drawn, and the heavy doors at both ends of this room, with uniformed but subtle security staff, were one of those lines.  For someone like me, studying here was a political act, one in the eye for anyone who dared to say that someone from my background didn’t belong here.  I staked my claim to whichever long, heavy table was free that day, sat two chairs down from the aisle to get a good view of the ceiling, and set about putting my scholarship money to good use. Class-conscious petulance aside, I also liked the history.  I got the feeling that the echoes of over a hundred years of academic study haunted this room.  It was almost entirely silent, all the better to hear the ghosts of all the pages turned, all the spines cracked here over the years.  I was joining a tradition that stretched back to 18-something-something, and my role here was to soak it all up and build on it in my own way, if I could.  A little disruption along the way couldn't hurt either. This particular morning, I had my head so far up Norman Fairclough’s arse that I didn’t notice the woman sit down opposite me.  The mornings were the best time to read something like Fairclough, because you needed to be fresh.  Dense and hard-going, but richly rewarding, I personally found his theories of how language can effect social change spoke to everything I wanted to achieve during my time at this ancient establishment.  Try to read it after lunch, however, and it all starts to sound like impenetrable bollocks. I glanced up at the end of a paragraph, and there she was, already settled, warm coat slung expansively over the seat next to her, and already a page into the introduction of whatever weighty text she was into.  She was either a postgrad or she was posh.  She seemed to fit right in, to be perfectly at home in this grand space.  She was acclimated to academic learning in a way that I simply wasn’t, either through a number of years here at the University, or a number of years in a school library that was a world apart from the one my own school had to offer.  She was quiet, she had loose brown hair falling over her eyes, good skin, and she was wearing an expensive-looking turtleneck sweater.  Pleasant enough, I thought to myself, and I awarded her some bonus points for being quiet. Some minutes later I glanced up at her again.  The Fairclough, for some unknown reason, was starting to feel like hard work.  Harder than it usually was at this time of the morning.  I don’t know if the woman had coughed or sniffed, but something caught the attention of my subconscious because I looked up a moment or two later to find that her hair had been swept back from her face.  She was focused on her text quietly, but suddenly, for the briefest of moments she flashed me the most cursory look, acknowledging my existence, but nothing more than that.  It was over before I even had the chance to look away politely, leaving me feeling rather stupid, with no choice but to get on with my reading. I tried and failed several times to get back into my paragraph on social change.  I was becoming too aware of the presence of this woman, sitting quietly and innocuously across the table from me.  It was becoming one of those stupid things where you’re trying so hard not to do something that you end up doing it.  I told myself I was stealing little glances here and there, but in reality the game called ‘eye contact’ had begun.  I knew I was rumbled when our eyes met for the fourth or fifth time and the corner of her lip curled up in mild amusement.  It was official, we were playing the eye contact game, and I smiled back to try and ease whatever embarrassment she might have been feeling. Then it happened.  She looked straight across the table at me and blinked.  Just a simple blink of both eyes, perhaps a couple of microseconds longer than normal.  When you get photographed by someone with a good camera with a powerful flash, it takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust, fading down from brilliant white to the regular brightness levels that you’re used to.  It felt exactly like that was happening to my brain.  My train of thought was completely lost, and took several seconds to recover.  I think I reflexively blinked several times to see if that would help, but I can’t be sure.  When I’d finally got myself together she was completely settled in studies again, leaving me to wonder if what had happened had really just happened. I told myself I was being stupid, and I told myself to get back to work.  This woman, whoever she was, was not really my type, and if she was anything like any of the other posh birds in here then we’d never get on.  I rationalised that whatever game we had been playing, if we’d been playing a game at all, had just been won outright, and that my best course of action was to concede defeat and get back to work.  I had roughly an hour or so left before my window to process Fairclough closed, and I reckoned that I’d be able to get to the end of this chapter before then if I kept my head down. I didn’t.  I managed fairly well for about 20 minutes, getting through three sections by forcing myself to make detailed notes, but as my own pen was scratching its way across my notebook, I was slowly becoming aware of another sound.  My imagination threw up an image of a gold-plated fountain pen describing florid cursive into something leather bound, anything to keep some distance between me and any kind of thoughts towards this woman across the table.  I looked up to see something else entirely.  Her finger was playing gently on the polished antique wood of the table as she read her book, making its own little shapes and curves, signifying nothing that I could make out. It was almost hypnotic to watch, and I was glad to have something to focus on rather than risking another look at her face.  I temporarily abandoned Fairclough to devote my time to the fascinating study of this absent-minded dance.  It could have been letters and words, as if she was taking notes, but it was no alphabet or language that I could make out.  It didn’t look like guitar fingering or piano practice either.  I was drawing a complete blank, so I tried to get back to my reading. After a few minutes of moderate success, I became aware of a strange sensation in the fingers of my left hand, barely noticeable.  Without realising it I had put my hand on the wood of the table and I was picking up the soft vibrations from the other side, where the woman’s arcane ritual or whatever it was continued.  My subconscious had clearly gone looking for its own answers, and although the delicate interwoven shapes remained a total mystery, I enjoyed feeling this connection, almost comfortable, between us.  I relaxed enough to skim-read the conclusion, and declared myself done for the morning. I looked up to see the autumn sun hit just the right angle in the high windows, illuminating the woman, outlining her in gold and bringing out the warmest copper tone that had been in her hair this whole time.  The scene was worthy of painting by a famous artist, and I did all I could to soak up the composition, the colours and the details before the sunlight faded.  I felt uncharacteristically guilty, as if I didn’t deserve to have stared so long, unworthy of such a heavenly vision, yet blessed by it all the same. Nervous and embarrassed, not really knowing what to do with myself any more, I started to pack up my things.  Across the table, the woman tapped out a quick message on her phone, then started to do the same.  I felt a strange sense that I should stand up when she stood up to leave the table, an antiquated show of respect that had almost certainly seen some use in this building across the decades.  Before I could act on it, she was up and filling her shoulder bag with books and papers.   It would have been rude to stare, so I feigned interest in my own affairs while she attended to hers.  I caught the wideness of her hips, and the way her long turtleneck sweater extended down past her waist to embrace them.  I caught the moment she lifted her fur-lined leather coat from the chair next to her, and I saw the cascade of red-brown hair that she scooped out from under the collar after putting it on.  There was a grace to the way her bag swung up to her shoulder, and then she was walking away, along the table towards the central aisle. I had already decided that I would come back to this table every day that I could, at the same time, if it meant I stood even the smallest chance of seeing this woman again.  Maybe after a few months of these silent games back and forth we might get to a stage where a suggestion of going for coffee would not be out of place, but I still had no idea where someone like me would find the courage to invite someone like her  As she rounded the end of the table, she paused for a moment and looked straight at me.  I didn’t know if she was smiling faintly at me or if that was her face at rest, but the way her eyes flicked to the heavy doors of the exit, then back to me was all the invitation I needed.   I hurriedly packed the rest of my things and went to follow her, falling into step a few paces behind.  She turned no heads as she passed, soft leather boots raising insufficient distraction from the expensive carpet.  Patches of sunlight set her hair aglow every few steps as she passed under each high window, teasing what it would look like in the full sunshine outside.  A wordless nod to the uniformed security guard on the desk, and she was through the door, leaving me with little choice but to follow in her wake and find out where in the world this woman would take me.