Light close to noon presses down on the stone stairway from above. The shadows are only a finger-joint deep on each step. The seating curves in a half circle, stretching more than twenty steps up from the round stage below to the wall at the top, and the stone on the left is dark with spreading black stains while the stone on the right is white as if washed. Green shrubs and a few trees poke their heads over the wall, and in the sky above them there is not a single cloud.
When you meet a stairway like this, your eyes scan down from the top. Before twenty steps have been fully counted, your shoulders rise a little, and the soles of your feet finish getting ready to step inside your shoes. Your breath shortens.
You haven't even climbed, yet your calves are already tensed, and your eyes stay fixed on the topmost step and will not come down. The body always arrives first.
The habit of the mind walking a road you haven't taken all the way to its end is as old as that stone stairway.
It is not too late to simply perch on the bottom step before climbing. While the coolness of the stone comes up through thin clothing, you spread your palm on the step beside you and watch the round floor of the stage settle below eye level. Thirty seconds is enough. The steps above go nowhere in the meantime.
The same thing works at a subway exit on the way home from work. Just before you step on the first stair, you stop for about two beats and take one look at how much your jaw is clenched. Whether it loosens or stays as it was differs from day to day, and there are days when just knowing that difference makes the day a little different.
Why the edge of the bottom step is worn the smoothest, the stone does not say.
