I realized, with the slow, dull awareness that such things come to me, that I have a particular type of sense memories that only occur with stairwells — and, specifically, walking down stairwells. I couldn’t tell you why this is, what there is about the feeling of walking down a set of stairs that locks everything about the experience away in my memory when everything else from that time period becomes faded and filled with holes; I couldn’t even tell you why it’s walking down the stairs as opposed to up that seems to be the key, but it is; perhaps walking up, I find myself too aware of other things and walking down I’m concentrating on less? Who can tell how the brain works.
And yet, I can tell you exactly how it feels to walk down the backstairs into the shared basement of my first apartment in the US; how thin and claustrophobic the stairwell was, how rotted the wooden stairs were to look at, yet how solid and sturdy they felt by comparison. I can tell you how oddly comfortable the experience was, even though it meant walking past multiple other apartments’ back doors on the way down — we lived on the top floor of the building — each one potentially about to open at any minute without warning. I could talk about the shift in light of the stairwell as I reached the parts of the building blocked from natural light by everything else all around.
Or I could share the feeling of walking down the stairwell in my high school, and how nervous I was when I first started attending the school at the top of the stairs, my teenage vertigo warning me to stay away from the railing in case I somehow fell over. Each step at first being nervous about how steep they felt, hating the enormous windows the stairwell opened out onto. (I had similar nerves walking the stairwell down from the top floor in art school, years later; there was something about the design of the central stairwell in the school that felt as if all it would take would be one trip and I’d somehow cartwheel over the railing and collapse to the floor three stories down, broken bones and blood. Schools and stairwells, apparently not a good combination for me.)
Or the stairs in the house I grew up in. Or the stairs in the hotel in Paris when I was 21 on a magical weekend trip that was tragic and heartbreaking as you can only feel when you’re 21. Or the stairs in my first house in Portland, or the stairs, or the stairs, or the stairs.
It’s nice, given how unreliable the rest of my memory is, to have something so clear in there for multiple markers and areas of my life. I’ll never understand why it’s walking down stairs, but I’ll always be grateful that they’re there.