It’s cold on your cheek as you wake up, unsure of where you are and hungover, vomit crusted on your shirt and an HK MP5 a few feet from your face. You slowly realize that what woke you up—a series of firm, but not quite painful, kicks—has stopped, and the man with the submachine gun is speaking to you. You try to concentrate, but his words just blend in with all the other sounds slowly materializing—polished steps on polished floors; a kiosk gate lifting, one side askew and scraping against its tracks; dull tones followed by duller departure announcements; a creaky rotisserie spinning a doner kebab. Despite the gun and the kicks, you move slowly, peeling your face from the floor, then putting your head in your hands and groaning before you try to get up, part of you wanting to let the groan get louder and louder until it becomes a roar that overwhelms everything else before suddenly stopping and finally leaving you in silence. You wish you could have even one more second with the cool stone soothing your matted forehead before you have to get to your feet and again add to the commotion.
It can still be seen where the frayed edges of the red carpet pull back. These stairs were always the centerpiece of your grandmother’s stories about how grand this building once was. They were “marvelous” and “stunning” and “oh, you should have seen them.” Your memories will center around entering the once-palatial theater to see Jurassic Park as a dinosaur-obsessed nine-year-old. Your grandmother’s words echo in your head as you search along the edges of the old staircase, looking for places where the stone below, the stone she described in such detail, is uncovered. Years later, just before she moves to the dementia ward, you’ll inherit a print from her apartment that once hung on the theater’s walls. As a child, you always just called it the “clown picture”—a clown in front of a mirror, despair pulling his face toward the floor you looked up from; you trying to make eye contact with him as your grandmother noticed you staring. You desperately wanted to ask the clown why he was so sad while your grandmother started describing the grandiosity of the place the picture came from, images of her as a child and her shiny, black-buckled shoes echoing up the same once-polished stairs that your LA Gears would one day climb.
It’s the nicest piece of furniture you’ve ever had. The table used to be in your roommate’s family house on a lake in suburban Michigan, but now it’s here in a smoke-filled alleyway apartment. For the longest time, you’ll feel uncomfortable about how casually food wrappers, dirty socks, liquor bottles, cigarette butts, weed shake, nitrous canisters, and assortments of pills and powders build up on it. It’s hard to be casual about nice things when you’re not used to them. You’ll have gotten over that discomfort by the time you’re raging about something at 4 in the morning and smashing a wine bottle on the corner of the table. The bottle will shatter and chunks of mosaiced stone will fly from the table and into your shins. A tiny piece of glass will get stuck in your foot so that when you step just right, you’ll feel pain for months . It will become a part of you, a reminder of a fury you’re still years from overcoming. One day your skin will finally push the glass out—a shard hardly larger than a grain of sand—but you’ll still step gingerly for weeks afterward, your body expecting pain even with nothing there to hurt it anymore.
It's handed to you with two neatly cut lines on it. Nobody really knows where the slab of polished rock came from anymore. It’s been passed from person to person, shitty apartment to shitty apartment to slightly nicer apartment, and so on. This will be the last time you’ll be in this one. A few weeks earlier the guy handing you the lines shared a story he wrote and asked you to edit it and you got too high and went too far, covering it with notes. You’ll later realize that you probably made him feel like shit and you’ll feel guilty about it for years. When he stops answering texts, you’ll tell yourself that sometimes people you could have sworn you cared about, and you could have sworn cared about you, were really just drug buddies destined to move on to other drugs and other buddies. You’ll convince yourself that’s okay. It’ll be another year before you hear about how deep things got for him. You’ll wonder if you’ll be there if he manages to dig himself out. You’ll wonder how much of you was really there in the first place.
It's what you think of when you think of change. Not antiquities or great halls or symbols of holiness or power pushing into the sky. None of them mean as much as the echoes of this train station down the street from where you grew up. You’re 10, seeing it in disrepair before the renovation, listening to stories of how important your struggling city once was; or you’re 15, taking a train to hang out with the punk kids and smoke all day; or you’re 19, returning for the holidays, home not feeling quite like home for the first time; or you’re 33, freshly separated and on the road to divorce, your friends stalking the mezzanine half-drunk as your train pulls in; or you’re 39, driving by the façade, unable to remember the last time you stepped inside. The transitionary space will become another wistful landmark in an increasingly unknown skyline. All the steps you’ve taken through it still repeat in your head but grow more and more unfamiliar, your own echoes becoming indistinguishable from all the others.
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