The Staircase to Spring's Return

Ever since he woke up to a change in gravity's pull one year ago, he spent his days sitting in the dried out riverbed separating the two towns. It was the hottest July by far, and also the driest. It was the longest July so far. Each day from dawn until dusk, passersby witnessed him sitting against the dusty wall, lost in thought. He was lost in the lingering ghost of currents that once swept through where he sat now. Nobody knew how he had managed to climb down the monumentally high wall with no ladder, no footholds in sight. But he had managed. Somehow, he had managed.

Each day he sat in the same spot, staring for hours on end at the hollow labyrinth of veinlike cracks which spread across the parched surface of the riverbed as far as his eyes could wander. They didn’t have to wander far. He knew this riverbed all too well, for it was where he now spent his days. He could barely make out the other side of the river, over a mile away. It defined the border of the neighboring town, a place he had never once visited over the course of his one hundred years on earth. But one day, one morning, one year ago, he awoke with a start to a jarring shift in gravity's pull.

The unseen force, which held his feet to the ground below him for one hundred years, now drew him toward the town across the river. The world in his mind turned sideways overnight. He needed to retrieve his lost footing. He knew it waited for him on the other side.

One night, after exactly three hundred and sixty-five days of watching the sun and moon travel across the sky, he stood up. With the only item he carried with him, a small garden spade, he dug into the diamond hard shell of the earth beneath his feet.

He dug for hours. He dug away at the bleak, dried up earth which he knew concealed every memory of the past. And sure enough, after five hours of digging, and digging, and digging, a tiny stream of water swelled upward into the deep chasm he had created. And sure enough, for the first time over the course of his one hundred years on earth, tears swelled upward from the deep chasm he had created within himself.

He dug for hours until the pool of forgotten water grew large enough. Then, aided by the mounds of dirt produced by hours of relentless digging, the brick building began. Carefully, painstakingly, he molded brick after brick made simply from dirt and water. With his spade he meticulously made sure the sides of each brick were completely flat, symmetrical, with perfect corners.

He needed them to fit perfectly together, with no flaws. It was just how it needed to be. Once, to break the monotony, he engraved a quote into one the bricks, a saying he heard a lifetime ago.

A year of brick making went by. A year of desperation in its purest form, a year of his silent yearning for gravity’s return, a year of carefully shaping each brick so it might fit in its rightful place. A year had gone by since he first found water at the heart of the riverbed, since he first found tears at the heart of himself.

Sadly, the old man reached a point of exhaustion so terrible that he drifted off to sleep the moment he finished making his final brick. Another year went by as he slept, making up for each tiring, sleepless moment of the year before. Waking up at the year’s end, he realized what had occurred and lay on the ground in anguish as he wept in bitter disappointment.

“What have I done?” he cried out, even though he was quite alone. “I’ve lost so much time, and I’m more tired than I was before I began this ridiculously impossible task. I’ll never reach the other side of the river, but I can feel its pull stronger than ever before.”

But his words were lost to the night as his gaze fell upon the sight in front of him. He found himself speechless.

Before him, ascending for over a mile from the spot where he stood, and ending at the top of the opposite cliff, was a staircase. He knew it belonged to him and felt gravity’s pull emanating from the top step. The strength of it dragged his weary feet up the vast staircase, one step at a time.

As he climbed he looked down in wonder at the bricks he so distantly recalled shaping with such tender care and determination. He didn’t know how they came to form the structure beneath his feet, but he knew not to question it.

He knew this was what needed to be.

Eventually he grew weary while making the seemingly endless ascent. His head heavy, he looked down at his feet. Under his right foot, he noticed, was the brick onto which he had carved a saying he knew from long ago. It came from a time in his life before he spent his days at the bottom of the dry river.

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

The familiar words caressed the worn skin of his bare feet while an indescribable awareness of warmth spread throughout his entire body and cleared his mind. Still standing on the single engraved stair, he turned around and drank in his surroundings. Without realizing it, he’d climbed high enough to see the sycamore trees surrounding the water’s edge. He saw that a thousand shades of green adorned the towering branches. He saw that Spring had indeed returned. For a moment he stood in quiet admiration, for it was many years ago that he had last seen these trees. They banished the illusion of solitude from his mind. He would never be alone in life as long as the trees breathed oxygen into his lungs, giving him the gift of existence

“Spring has returned,” he said to himself and to the trees, and with that he resumed his journey up the stairs, no longer weary, no longer alone.

He reached the top step and his feet took their place on a part of the earth that was new to them, and yet felt so familiar. Gravity shifted back into place as he noticed somebody standing by the river’s edge, illuminated only by the celestial bodies above.

The child, a boy of maybe five or six years old, approached the new arrival, slowly, steadily.

“You’re finally here,” said the boy.

“I know,” the man responded. “You’re the one who built the stairs.”

“I know,” the boy responded.

“Do you know why I came here?” the brick maker asked.

“You live on the North Side of the river,” the builder of the staircase answered slowly, steadily. “You’ve never been able to see the North Star.”

The old man nodded, knowing he had finally found peace, and for the rest of the night the two of them sat at the river’s edge. They gazed up at the North Star until morning arrived.

They gazed up at the rising sun, understanding everything.