Encountering Stairs
For centuries, stairs have been doing the work for human elevating and descending intentions—the very intentions that were the origin of stairs’ existence.
Humans step on them without acknowledgment.
Humans rarely acknowledge things they find useful.
Rarely do people say, “The stairs brought me to the fourth floor.”
Or, “The toothpaste and toothbrush cleaned my mouth.”
Instead:
“I walked upstairs.”
And:
“I brushed my teeth.”
On my daily walk around the reservoir, I was thinking exactly about this, trying to imagine encounters that were mutual.
Taking the stairs up to my floor, I imagined every step as our meeting viewed by the stairs.
The stairs might have been encountered like that for the first time—especially in a building with an elevator, their young, flashy, electrically assisted competitor, who gets full grammatical recognition:
“The elevator took me upstairs.”
“The elevator brought me down.”
“The elevator stopped on the second floor.”
Stairs have been observing this injustice in silence.
Today, with me seeing their side of the story, they had their moment of being seen.
Finally, someone was walking home while thinking about the encounter.
How does the encounter feel for the stairs?
For once, I stopped treating them as passive infrastructure.
Step after step, I allowed the stairs to approach me.
This was apparently all the permission they needed.
They responded immediately.
They shifted the array.
I arrived at what I knew with complete certainty was my floor, opened what I knew was my door, entered the dark hallway and thought:
Mother is already sleeping. She turned off the light.
I looked at my phone and began taking off my shoes.
Then a large man came running toward me from the darkness, screaming:
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!”
This was significant evidence that I might not be home.
It had to be checked thoroughly.
I stepped backward to confirm the apartment number, still thinking that it might be the number of my apartment.
In the validation contest between a screaming big man and an apartment number, the number somehow met my standards of verification.
Under the newly verified condition of the Wrong Number, the screaming man repeated his question.
“What are you doing here?”
I explained:
“I was looking at my phone and taking off my shoes.”
This was entirely true and completely useless.
Strangely, it calmed him down.
Perhaps people who intend murder generally maintain their footwear.
Now I needed to explain how I had entered his apartment.
At this point, I betrayed an innocent party.
“The elevator brought me to the wrong floor,” I said.
I had not taken the elevator.
I had taken the stairs.
But I could hardly tell the frightened man:
“I am sorry. While climbing the stairs I began contemplating the possibility that the stairs were encountering me. Apparently the encounter shifted the floor array.”
So I blamed the elevator.
Only later did I understand what had happened.
The stairs knew.
They had waited patiently through generations of humiliation.
They knew that if they shifted me by exactly one floor, I would protect our encounter.
And they knew whom I would blame.
Their competitor.
The elevator.
For generations:
“I climbed the stairs.”
But:
“The elevator took me.”
Tonight the stairs finally took someone.
Me.
And when the consequences arrived, the elevator took the blame.
The big man joined in, saying that the elevator had done the same thing to him once and he had ended up in the apartment of his neighbor Thomas, who lives directly below him.
The innocent elevator had now been blamed twice in one encounter with the stairs.
The stairs said nothing, but thought:
“You come back to us every time that elevator breaks, knowing that we keep standing here, waiting for your recognition, simply remaining between the floors.”
The stairs said nothing.
They had already received what they had waited generations for.
Someone had finally wondered what the encounter was like for them.
They remained between the floors,
perfectly still,
having moved me,
having won.