Where Does the Sky Begin

A parable on love and agency

Where Does the Sky Begin…?
A parable on love and agency

Author’s Notes:

I’ve been thinking about agency and where it comes from, how it’s avoided, and what love demands of it.

This is a philosophical short story. Not a confession, not an indictment, not a diary.

It’s about two creatures governed by different survival logics, and the quiet moment when clarity finally outweighs warmth.

Read slowly.

I often ask people where the sky begins when I want to know who defines their world.

Some point upward, tracing an invisible ceiling as if meaning lives somewhere beyond their reach. Some recite science-layers of atmosphere, pressure, and distance- representing the safety gained from university and professors. Others invoke the heavens, the sky is a boundary set by God, right where Earth loosens its grip. None of these answers satiate me, they are never fulfilling, bursting at the seams with hesitation and an appeal to authority.

I search for answers, through books, through nature, through conversation and connection. I come breathtakingly close. Perhaps whether someone experiences the world as something defined for them, or something they are responsible for defining themselves. “Where does the sky begin?" I search for answers endlessly, this time silently, I observe the world around me, paying meticulous attention to the inhabitants within it.

Perhaps the Turtle understood this instinctively.

He moved through the world slowly out of discipline, carrying his home with him that some may mistake for armor but upon closer review it was authorship. A Turtle settles where he stands not unlike a tree or a bridge. He believed systems could be rebuilt if one was willing to sit with them long enough to understand their failures. He believed consciousness was practiced, lived, not inherited.

The Penguin did not see the sky this way.

She plainly enjoyed the weather.

She was never alone.
Not really.

There was always another body.
Another conversation.
Another current to follow

She arrived in the Turtle’s life warm, expressive, deeply alive in the way people are when they feel everything but understand very little of why they feel it. She spoke in confessions and apologies, in laughter that came easily and sorrow that lingered too long. She loved loudly, often, urgently. She loved the way someone loves when love feels like oxygen: necessary, panicked, and constantly in danger of running out.

I watched her move through rooms the way penguins move through water. Graceful, communal, never still. Always surrounded. Always in motion. The warmth was plentiful. Direction was not.

Penguins are birds that cannot fly, though they were shaped as if they might have once remembered how. They survive not by elevation, but by proximity. By huddling together for warmth. By swimming together until the cold forgets where they live.

She mistook this for freedom.

The Turtle mistook it for something he could understand or perhaps solve.

From a distance, I, an observer, could already see the pattern forming. He listened. He organized. He regulated. Offering language where there was confusion, structure where there was impulse. The Turtle thought love meant helping someone locate themselves inside the world. He thought if he held the map long enough, she might look up and realize she could read it too.

But maps are useless to those who confuse the ocean for a well, and depth for direction.

She spoke often of cycles, how she didn’t want to repeat them, how she feared being the reason things fell apart like in her past. The words sounded like accountability, but they floated. Observation without agency. Weather reports mistaken for choice.

Regardless, they loved, and were in love.

As the snow fell and fell again, until even its memory dissolved into slush, the Turtle and The Penguin were inseparable. Winter bound them together with the quiet urgency of survival. The cold made intimacy efficient. There was no excess movement, no wandering far from what was warm and known.

He showed her revolution, a deep-seated acceptance of self, It was the kind that reorganizes the inner world. He taught her that intention could be practiced, that discipline could be shaped not as punishment but clarity. He spoke of systems and roots, of how change begins slowly, underground, where no one is watching. With him, the world felt legible.

She showed him something else.

She showed him how to be light. How to laugh without reason. How to let hours dissolve into play. She brought him back to childlike wonder, to the pleasure of being unburdened by consequence, if only briefly. In her presence, seriousness softened. The future loosened its grip.

Their love lasted the entire winter season.

What neither of them noticed because love rarely announces its costs, was that the warmth they shared had become asymmetrical. The heat that kept The Penguin alive through the cold months was drawn directly from the Turtle. Slowly. Quietly. Without malice.

Penguins are birds that cannot fly, though they were shaped as if they might have once remembered how. They survive winter by huddling. By pressing close enough that individual heat becomes collective salvation. But the Turtle was not built to disperse himself endlessly. His shell, his home, was meant to be sufficient…Not sacrificial.

For the first time, the weight of that shell became too much.

What had once been protection had now become burden. The constant regulating. The constant soothing. The constant caretaking. Each act small on its own, reasonable even, but together they formed a fog around him. A dullness. A fatigue he could not immediately name.

She was never a project. He told himself that often. Never an investment. Never something to fix.

And yet her foundation was broken.

She spoke of it plainly, sometimes even tenderly. She told him she did not know how to stand alone. She told him the ground beneath her shifted constantly as she ran from the cold. And in moments of vulnerability, moments she mistook for honesty, she told The Turtle that he had the tools to fix it.

She did not say this as a demand.
That was the danger.

She said it as belief.

Winter ended.

By late spring, the Turtle understood something he had avoided all season: love could be sincere and still be extractive. That care could slide, imperceptibly, into depletion. That being needed was not the same as being met.

Unbeknownst to her the only thing she wanted, she needed, was warmth, a body.

The Turtle departed, not in anger, not dramatically but because staying any longer would have required him to abandon the very authorship that had made him who he was.

Where does the sky begin?

The Turtle, much like myself, thought he knew. The Penguin never too far in the back of his mind. The interaction with her didn’t bruise him, perhaps he had left quickly enough to not suffer a spiritual wound. His purpose remained adamant, throughout the summer and fall, he continued his journey. It wasn’t a coming of age story, he was much more developed than that. He organized, connected to the people, and helped others all in the name of answering that one question. It was Winter once again, and penguin sightings were none too rare; perhaps he was looking for her.

A Sunday approached quietly.

A conversation had been promised, not the drifting kind, but one with weight. The penguin spoke of it often. She said she had prepared something. That she had changed. That she was ready to prioritize him.

Before that she needed help.

The Turtle high from the satisfaction and reward from helping others on his journey saw no harm in obliging.

She was frantic about liberation, The Penguin had cultivated a deep sense of justice from her interactions with The Turtle and in his absence refined it into her own. She yearned for freedom for her and her people.

The Turtle spent hours with her editing her theory, chartering her ideology carefully, deliberately. This was how he loved: with time, with attention, with action. The irony did not escape me.

Objects gathered around them:

a glowing phone
a marked-up document
a waiting bed
a promise suspended in air.

When The Turtle completed his work on her project, The Penguin said she wasn’t ready to look at it yet. She wanted to “just talk and enjoy his presence she had waited on for so long, she was cold. Too cold to do anything.” He told her he was going to bed early, that they needed to have their conversation soon. She said she would be ready. The Turtle left, he carried his home and decided to wait elsewhere, for the moment The Penguin would reveal all she promised, to hear how she’s changed. He retracted into his shell, he stood in silence, intention and vulnerability.

Thirty minutes later, a message arrived explaining that the room had been filled with friends and the like. A small huddle had been formed in her home. Nothing serious. Just warmth.

This was the fracture.

Not because she lied, but because even inside the promise of revelation and change, The Penguin moved as she always had: toward noise, toward proximity, towards the nearest available at the time.

It was after this that I noticed the other body, the presence of another before the Turtle did.

There was another man moving at the edges of her life, one she spoke of casually, almost academically. She described him the way people describe furniture in a room they don’t plan to stay in, useful, present, easily replaced. There was no reverence in her voice, no awe, no gravity. Only function.

She did not love him.

A distinction that would matter even if only to her.

He was not chosen by her, he was available and warm.

When The Turtle had previously stepped back and left her in the spring, when his stillness created space instead of shelter, she filled the gap the only way she knew how. Penguins are birds that cannot fly, though they were shaped as if they might have once remembered how. They survive winter by huddling. By pressing close enough that individual heat becomes collective salvation. They do not endure cold through solitude. They survive by gathering bodies… any bodies close enough that the temperature holds.

This was not infidelity in the traditional sense.
It was thermodynamics.

For her,
it was survival.

She could never understand and did not understand why being alone felt painstakingly unbearable. She would ruminate and manifest it as fear, as confusion, as shame. She was paralyzed by the idea of being judged for something she could not name. But I could see it clearly, solitude felt like death to her nervous system. Silence felt like exposure to her inner reflection, for isolation would not cast her into loneliness, no, it would confront her with herself.

Thus, she gathered warmth.

She told herself it was necessary, she told herself it was harmless. Temporary, fantasy, survival. She told herself she would explain it later- when the Turtle was calmer, for he had just returned and she didn’t want to lose the specific warmth the Turtle gave. She promised herself when the timing was better, when the stakes were safer. She titled her reluctance to tell the truth as shame, shame of her actions, the possible shame of being judged, the shame of being seen for who she was. She needed warmth and bodies for survival, that’s it!, she proclaimed. In truth, it was avoidance, not of judgement but of the cold.

To her, the warmth of the Turtle was different.

With him, she felt seen rather than surrounded. Held rather than huddled. Their intimate moments did not flood her senses; perhaps it anchored them. That was why she loved him. That was why she secretly feared him. The Turtle and by proxy, his love asked her to stand somewhere. Warmth asked only that she float boundlessly.

She hid the other man - the other body, not because it mattered but because she foresaw it would illuminate her inner-self she did not yet have language for. That her nature still outweighed her agency. That even when seen and held, she reached for proximity before principle.

When the Turtle learned of it, there was no explosion. Only quiet recognition. To him she had not chosen another man over him. She had chosen not to be alone without him.

This distinction did not matter.
It changed nothing.

Because love does not survive on warmth alone.

It requires intention, ownership, and the ability to endure cold long enough to decide where you stand.

The Turtle. With a heart as heavy as his home, asked quietly,
“Jewels… where does the sky begin?”

The Penguin. With tears as burdensome as her nature. replied, almost rehearsed,
“They say at the horizon. A place people like us could never reach.”

She recoiled as she said it.

The Turtle did not argue.

He left.

Days passed and The Penguin surfaced publicly, declaring herself divine, desirable, powerful and immediately confessing confusion. She wondered why she doesn’t swim the ocean with the confidence that she is cloaked in the most divine of mystical waters. A worthy being anyone would wish to huddle with for warmth.

She began to search for bodies in a static way.
Never pursuing,
Only waiting -
for who is available,
and
who would approach.

I noticed something subtle then:
Without The Turtle absorbing her uncertainty, The Penguin’s movements grew erratic.

Louder. Faster. Less convincing.
And The Turtle?

Within The Penguin he saw a deep sadness, not due to the pain she caused him or herself. But due to the overwhelmingly painful reality her own nature confines her to. penguins require the warmth of others to survive but not in the way a lover does, no.

She was burdened not by her deep need for bodies to keep her warm one after the other, not by cycles, not by fear. She was burdened by her inability to generate agency for her own survival.

For you see -

Penguins are birds that cannot fly- and yet this is not why she cannot answer the question.
Penguins survive winter by huddling- and yet this is not why she cannot be alone.
It is simply because she does not know where she begins.
It is simply because she does not know how to take control.
She cannot answer where the sky begins, not because it is too grand or out of reach,
But because she has never stood anywhere long enough to place it.

So the Turtle stood.

He did not take her warmth with him.

He did not strip her of comfort or condemn her nature. He continued alone.

And in the quiet that followed—without applause, without witnesses—the answer revealed itself:

There was no villain in the end.
Only two creatures governed by different skies.

He finally understood.

The sky does not begin at the horizon, with God, or from scientific conjecture.
The sky is not a place, but a concept.
It is the line that separates us from the cosmos and the divine we imagine above us.

The sky begins wherever you decide it does.
At your feet.
At your breath.

At the moment you stop outsourcing meaning
and begin authoring it.

And that is something… No amount of warmth can teach.

---

Author’s Note

This story is not about blame, morality, or resolution in the traditional sense.

The figures here are symbolic. Their choices are not meant to be judged, only understood.
If you recognized yourself in either creature, that recognition is the work.

Read it as a parable.
Sit with it.
Stand where you stand.

If this story resonated with you, feel free to share it.