The Sky and I

I don’t think I simply started loving the sky.

I think I started seeing myself in her.

Somewhere between difficult days, long silences, unfinished thoughts, and emotions too heavy to explain, I began looking up more often. And the strange part was — the sky never looked indifferent to me.

She always seemed to be feeling something.

Some days, she arrived swollen with dark clouds, carrying rain like unshed tears. Heavy. Restless. Overwhelmed. The kind of heaviness that presses softly against your chest without warning.

And on those days, I could feel her in me.

Other days, she stretched endlessly blue and distant, beautiful in a way that almost felt emotionally unavailable. Calm on the surface, while holding storms somewhere far away.

That felt familiar too.

I started noticing how deeply the sky affected me. Not just visually — emotionally.

A grey sky could slow my thoughts. A storm cloud could make me feel understood. A sudden patch of blue could soften an entire difficult day. Sunsets felt like quiet acceptance. Night skies felt lonely in a way that comforted me instead of hurting me.It became impossible to separate my moods from hers.

People talk about weather as if it only changes the world around us. But I think some of us carry the weather within us too.

Some of us feel clouds before the rain arrives.

And maybe that is why I photograph her so obsessively now.

Not because I want to capture beauty. But because I want to remember how she made me feel in that exact moment.

The sky has become the only thing that mirrors me without asking questions.

She understands heaviness without needing explanation. She knows what it means to hold too much. To stay quiet while carrying storms. To look beautiful and breaking at the same time.

Sometimes she is dramatic. Sometimes distant. Sometimes unbearably soft. Sometimes impossible to read.

Just like me.

I started calling the sky “she” without even realizing when it happened.

“When she is moody.” “When she’s expressive.” “When she carries the said and the unsaid.”

Because she does.

She carries light and darkness together. She holds chaos gracefully. She collapses into rain and still returns beautiful the next morning.

There are evenings when I stand still under a stormy sky and feel like she is exposing emotions I tried very hard to hide from the world.

And there are mornings when the clouds part slightly and I feel hope return to me in quiet ways no person has ever managed to give me.

That’s the thing about the sky.

She never asks me to explain myself. She never tells me I’m too emotional. Too sensitive. Too much. Too complicated.

She just changes beside me.

And somehow, in watching her do that, I’ve slowly started allowing myself to change too.

Maybe that is why I keep taking pictures of clouds.

Not because I am documenting the sky.

But because I am documenting versions of myself I don’t always know how to speak about.

And somewhere between watching her change and feeling myself change with her, the line between us slowly disappeared.

Her storms became mine. My silences became hers. I saw my chaos in her thunder, my softness in her sunsets, my longing in her endlessness.

I no longer just admired the sky.

I became a part of her. And somehow, she became a part of me.

Now, when I look up, it no longer feels like I am looking at something distant.

It feels like recognition.

And maybe that is what becoming a nephophile truly is — not simply loving clouds, but finding pieces of yourself floating quietly within them.