• (Note:If you decide you don't want to read the whole thing, I put "-XXXXX-" to indicate a good place to stop.)


    I have always considered karma a science. Rather than a mystical force that reacts to your intentions, I believed it to be a series of reactions to the way you live your life. Cruelty will make you a miserable person, who only trusts people to be cruel, and receives only hatred in return for his deeds. Kindness will make you content, and make you worthy of any good fortune that may come your way. I cannot, however, think of any explanation to why I wound up on the stairs.

    I had awoken in much pain, my muscles and bones ached in several areas spread out across my body. Everything around me was dimly lit, and my surroundings, albeit plain, were rather difficult to see. Within a few groggy moments, I had realized I had been sleeping on a set of solid gray stone steps, extending upwards into the shadows of the room. At my feet was a flat square area built to allow the stairs to turn, before continuing down into darkness. I painfully arose, knowing now that the source of my discomfort was from sleeping on the steps. As to how I had fallen asleep on the steps I had no idea. My ability to remember anything was somehow compromised. I could remember brief blurry images of friends and family, places I've been and things I've said, but nothing of actual events in my lifetime, especially anything pertaining to my current situation.

    Blood rushed to my extremities as I stood and observed my surroundings more extensively. There wasn't much to look at, the walls were a plain white, matching the slightly darker steps. The inner edge of the steps had no wall, only railing to prevent one from falling off. Looking over the edge, and squinting, I could see the stairs turning again and again. Apparently I was in a stairwell, the bottom of which I could not see. Peering upwards yielded similar results, no roof in sight. As I looked around I also realized that there was no lighting fixtures anywhere, the dark ambient glow of the area seemed to come from nowhere at all. It was with this realization that I became uneasy, something was definitely wrong.


    Unsure of what I should do, I leaned up against the wall, still too sore to really move around. Where the hell was I? Why could I not remember how I had gotten here? I felt for a bump on my head, thinking I may had been struck, but there was nothing. The base of my skull was sore from laying on the step, but that felt nothing like the result of a concussive blow. I thought for a moment that I may be dreaming, but quickly I felt a sinking in my stomach, knowing that everything was far too vivid despite my grogginess. My eyes began to adjust, and I could see more and more of my surroundings, but they yielded no assistance. Clearly I had to investigate, and climb further up or down the stairs, but which way should I go?

    After brief consideration, I decided to go downwards and try to reach the ground level. I treaded lazily down the stairs, sliding my hand along the cold railing to keep my self steady. All I could hear in the darkness was the tap off my shoes on the stone steps. I subconsciously lightened my step to stifle the noise, due to my uneasiness of being the only audible thing in the stairwell. Despite my efforts, my footsteps echoed off the plain white walls, trailing off throughout the stairwell. The quiet echo gave off an eerie feeling of extensive size. At regular intervals, I would reach another flat portion where the steps would again turn inwards before heading down.

    I became more and more distraught when I realized my head was clearing but my memories were not returning. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. They seemed to scramble and flee like some fading recollection of a dream. The more I thought about it, the more everything seemed made up. I could not remember the face or names of my parents, how many siblings I had, or if I even had siblings. My pace slowed, and I stopped to lean on the wall once more. I could only think that I must have been drugged, my life being nothing but a blur in my own mind. I decided that dwelling on it would make no difference at the moment. I wanted out of this building and into the open air where I could get my bearings. I continued down the stairs again.

    There was no telling how long I descended. The lighting was constant, only tapering off into blackness at the end of my eyesight. I looked over the railing again and again, checking for any indication of progress, and found there was none. I tried to speculate how tall the building was, or how tall it could possibly be. I could only guess that I had been walking for over an hour, meaning the building had to be massive, and the fact that it continued well above the point at which I awoke only baffled me more. Perhaps at a certain point I had gone underground, not knowing about it due to lack of windows. I became more frantic and frustrated, there HAD to be an end to the stairs. I began quickly gliding down each step as quickly as possible, now eager to reach my destination, wherever it may be. I knew only that it lay below me. With each step I felt more desperate. With each flight I felt more hopeless. My legs began to wear out, and soon they gave way, sending me tumbling down half a flight. I lay on one of the flat areas, un-injured, but broken none the less.

    -XXXXX-

    I lay there sprawled on the cold stone, without a clue of what I was supposed to do with myself. Any sort of movement seemed futile. I was sure I would never find any progress in continuing, as the winding steps spiraled downward into what was quite possibly an endless coil of solitude. Though an exit might be found by climbing upwards, I had no desire to retrace my steps for what was most likely another futile effort. So I lay there, at first gasping from my desperate sprint, and then slowly gaining my breath as I tried to fabricate more useless escape plans. I got up briefly to consider the only two options I could come up with, and slumped myself dishearteningly against the wall when those too seemed futile.

    The wall was made out of the same peculiar stone as most of my surroundings, only covered with a thin layer of white paint. What kind of material it was, I didn't know. It appeared to be some sort of cement, though it was rather smooth and seemed more solid than standard cement. I was certain that it was dense enough to impede me from any attempt to burrow out. Everything was made of it too, with the exceptions of the paint, and the metal rail that kept me from falling over the side; Which brought me to my second option.

    I shuddered to think what it would be like to continuously free fall in the empty space through the center of that miserable place, screaming through the air without any hope of surviving. At best I would clip the fast moving surroundings with my limbs, and die of blood loss, or worse. It was not the escape I was looking for. Quite obviously I was not ready to consider it as a serious option.

    So there I lay again, With no means of escape. All movement and thoughts seemed futile. All I could do was try to remember something. It seemed ridiculous to think of how I even got here in light of the absurdity of this "structure". Had someone opened a secret, or magic door and dumped me there? Was I teleported there by some sort of Scifi device? Of all the things I could not remember, my arrival was the most disappointing loss, as it might offer some hint of a way to leave.

    Actually, that's not entirely true. Not knowing who you are, or even where you are from, can make you surprisingly home sick. I yearned for some thought of security, of some warming memory that could possibly take my mind off of this sick joke. A memory of smiling faces, a loving embrace, or even something as simple as a warm room, would have been nice. I had none of these. It seemed odd that I even knew what these things were, being that I could think of a time when I had actually seen or experienced anything but what I found here. When I thought about them, they felt almost stranger and colder than the stairwell. My mental images of these things, though surprisingly specific, all seemed oddly detached. Could they possibly be things dreamed up prior to my awakening? Had I always been here and forgotten? Were what I presumed were fleeting memories some kind of strange fantasy I had thought up while unconscious?

    I felt like I was slowly going insane. Surely this was some sort of mad torture ritual, or a punishment for some foul deed I committed. If that were the case, it was working marvelously. I felt horrible, trapped, and alone. The cruelty it would take to put someone here was sick. Even if I had done some horrible thing, I had no idea what it could be. They might as well have put an innocent person in here. Punishment like this would be like taking revenge on a body absent of what made it wrong. The more I thought about it, the less I assumed I was being punished. My situation, however, was no doubt a sadistic means of imprisonment.

    With time my mind had wondered off to pointless things. I found myself trying to imagine the stairwell as a whole. At first I pictured myself sitting there, the only landmark in the entire thing. Then I appeared smaller and smaller in my mind's eye, as it moved back to fit more and more steps into view. I shrunk with the growing change in perspective of my thoughts, and the stairs became longer and narrower as I attempted to conceive it's impossible length. Soon it was nothing but a thin line. At the center was the now invisibly tiny speck that was me. As minuscule as my presence was, I remained the only point of reference in all that I knew to be true. Suddenly, I noticed the faint sound of shoes on stone.


    I launched from my spot and pressed against the rail, hanging over it with my head turned on it's side to hear where the sound might have come from. I could no longer hear them, which again left me with the painful decision between up or down. I had just came from up, so I felt it was likely I would have passed anyone who might be up there; However, if I moved downwards, and the person had been behind me, I would be running from the exact thing I was attempting to chase. For no good reason, I decided to head down again. As I began to quickly move down the steps, I could once again hear the sound of feet echoing in the distance. I raced frantically, trying to catch the sound with both my eyes and my ears. Sadly, I quickly found that I had not fully recovered from my previous dash, and soon my legs tired again, and I was left gasping for air as I lost hope of perusing the footsteps. I was disheartened even more when I heard them slowly fade, which marked that they were departing and not approaching. I had chosen the right way, but my resolve, and ability to follow had failed me.

    By the time I had caught my breath again, I began to doubt if I had ever heard the sound at all. It was possible I was chasing some delusional hope that someone else resided there. It even seemed entirely likely that I was chasing the echo of my own footsteps. That could explained how
    they faded as soon as I stopped my pursuit of what might have been nothing at all. I was lost in the possibilities, even the possibility that there was something out there that had managed to evade me, and that with a little more effort, or had I been better rested, I might have caught it.


    I was now more miserable, tired and hopeless than ever. I lay on my back, gazing at the surface above me. Focusing on the bottom of those overhead steps gave me a sensation of enclosure, which was the first comforting thing I could find, as the size of this place was really getting to me. Again I started to think of things pointless, and beyond my ability to perceive. I thought of the tiny particles that made up the stone around me. I thought of how between those tiny particles lay some sort of empty space. That same empty space extended everywhere, inside and outside. I pretended I could somehow travel through that space with my mind, weaving through the seemingly impenetrable stone and escaping into the air of the outside world. I would escape what was really a small tower, less than a few hundred feet high, into the air, and over fields. I would be carried on winds along with dark and moist rainclouds, bristling with statically charged droplets of water, until the energy is release with a terrific crash, and the droplets condense into drops that scatter across the land and across the face of a man standing with hand outstretched. The water gathers in his cupped hands, and then he splashes it against his already wet face. I drop to my knees and sink into the muddy ground, where I put my hands back out to gather more water.

    Was I dreaming? Had I really escaped? I felt the cold of the rain cut to my bones, and turn my nose numb. I let myself fall forward into the mud, and reveled in it's moisture as I slowly realized that the cold that touched my face came from an unyielding stone surface. I begrudgingly returned to the reality of the stairs, with some degree of the joy I felt in the rain remaining in my mind and in my bones. I rose to my feet, and walked over to the rail, looking over it with a solemn, yet peaceful gaze.