stairs

I met him on the stairs. This hospital staircase was oddly dingy, I thought, despite the cleanliness of the rest of the building. 

I was going up to visit my grandmother, and he was headed downstairs. There was only one destination in the basement of this hospital, the room I had just come from, the non-denominational prayer space. We were quite literally ships in the night, carrying our cargo as the waves threatened to capsize us as we stood, disoriented on the stairs in this darkness we were not used to, on our way up or on our way down or just standing and trying not to trip. As all this ran through my mind, he stopped walking, and - moved by some external impulse - so did I. Neither of us turned around to face each other. The hospital basement was a place you went to in a moment of weakness. 

My moment of weakness was over, if it could ever end, and his was just beginning. I wondered if his someone was already gone, or on the way out. You could never tell. You hit the terminal velocity of grief far before they were gone, in most cases. You couldn’t tell by looking. Despair at the thought of losing was no different from despair at the thought of the lost. 

The ten Hail Marys I had said in the prayer room while distracted by the footsteps of an entire hospital functioning above my head seemed to hold me upright as I ascended the stairs, while his unsaid prayers pulled him, dragged him into the basement. 

We were still standing on the stairs, comforted - if only for a moment - by each other's company. 

He whispered something as we parted ways, a phrase I will never forget.

“It never ends,” he said, and whether he was referring to the pain or the hope or the staircases or any of the other things this place was full of, I will never know.