Trembling With Fear 04/18/21

The Top Step by Benjamin Gardner

Here I stand, at the top step. 

It has been at least three days. I’m feeling somewhat faint but here I stand at the top of the old creaky staircase of the house that I grew up in. I have seen three days of the world go by through two large windows on the landing. I can see the morning light, high noon, and evening. I cannot sleep so I watch the darkness. 

This house, the one that I grew up in, is in a mid-sized town. There are people all around; neighbors, acquaintances, officials, and workers, but none of them need to notice me. There are rabbits, hummingbirds, monarchs, and other beings that I can see from the windows, too. I can see the blossoms of a magnolia tree. Only the blossoms know me.  

There are visitors but I do not know who they are; they stay hidden on the lower staircase but they speak to me and tell me stories. I’ve lost count of how many visitors there have been. Two people on the lowest step sang me a song about all of the trouble in the world. One person read a news ticker. One read a draft of a memo that he was planning to send out to his coworkers. The memo was about how no one was doing as much work as he was. I wished him to be happy, to be healthy, and to have ease of well-being before he left, practicing meditations of loving kindness towards him even though I really wanted to curse him the moment he started speaking.  

The visitors must come in through the front door that I left unlocked before I decided to walk up these stairs. Had I left it unlocked? It seems like an oversight on my part. I wonder, though, how do they know that I am up here? I told no one of my plans. None of the visitors see the long nails that I drove through my feet into the top step to secure myself. Thin rivers of blood run down the sides of my feet and are slowly walking down the stairs. Eventually the visitors will see the blood.  

The back door is locked. I have heard something up in the attic, but it has not come down yet. I hear it deep in the night; a soft, padded, step that seems to know that I am here and that I am here still. I hope that it will not come down until after I am gone. Perhaps it is kind, the thing that lives in the attic. Perhaps it is not a monster. I try hard to let the sounds go, not to fixate on them. I try to let the sounds from the attic be and know that they are temporary, that they are an illusion.

The night visitors are beautiful and terrifying. I can’t see them most of the time but when I do they shimmer in blues and pinks and yellows that leave traces on my eyelids when I rest. They only chant or sing, I can’t quite decide what it is. A single long sound that goes up and down somewhat melodically. A melisma, I guess. It is hard to understand what they are singing, but it makes sense at the same time. 

I do not know how long I will last here, but I think that is the point. It is a slow process, the transformation, and I need all of the time I can get to make it fully happen, fully accept the next phase, the next life. I am scared but I am also ready; my body will transcend into something new, something beyond life. An archetype and a martyr. 

For now, though, I stand here on the top step, looking outside at each day and night that pass, preparing my meditations and the rituals that will take me out of this world. There is a weight to the silence that prevails when no visitors are here. I turned off the water and electricity to the house and I had no idea how quiet it would be without the hum of the refrigerator or the fan of the air conditioner. Each creak and groan of the house settling sounds like the earth itself. Here I stand, nailed to the top step, my place of contrition and repentance. 

Sometimes it is only the sound of my lungs filling with air and my heart pumping blood through my veins. Sometimes I sing to myself songs from another world, songs of providence and potential.