Unspoken Realities

The staircase at the office is basically a high tube of concrete with no windows, little air and harsh artificial light. Doors are massive and the steps are uninviting. You could run the stairs from top to bottom and find no one. This makes this place - very disliked for moving between floors - ideal for those tending secret meetings, rushing to talk privately with friends, make delicate calls and even make it scene of secret affairs. It's poor conditions amplify the sounds, so if you are really quiet about your business, you can hear perfectly the moment someone else steps into the staircase, wherever in the many levels of it, and escape in time to avoid discovery.

I don't like the elevators, so I'm one of the few users of the staircase that use it for vertical transport. In passing I've noticed the secretary of a given floor  wrapping her lips around the mouth of one of the guards, and the sudden silence between conspiring elements who eye you as you pass trying to asses if you are a spy or an unknown friend of the one they want to get rid of. I've also noticed the secret breaks of some groups of workers who want to detach themselves from their cubicles and tasks, but having such a represive superior, they decide to hide where no one would ever look for them: the staircase.

One of these staircase stories is about this beautiful girl with whom I worked for a couple of months only. Milky skin gently freckled, like a hint of cinnamon sitting on top of a bowl of milk, and ginger lax hair, she's a little box of surprises. Soft spoken, careful, discrete, you would never guess she's married and mother of three or four kids. Her honey eyes light up with her smile, which she is careful to uncover, and rather keep everything around her to herself. You would never guess her passion of engines, or any of the astonishing features of her wilder side.

Back then at our group worked also a sweet guy, tall brunet, also milk skinned, light eyed and good natured. This guy - lets call him Jack - became best friends from the begining with another guy - Nate. Nate was your typical heartbreaker. Handsome, charming smile, sexy voice, and with that vibe about him that could get you on your back in five seconds flat. Jack was all about Nate from the begining, and Nate was also quite taken by Jack, which made everybody at the group to tease them about being a couple. Both Nate and Jack were married with children, and their wives became pregnant again at the same time. Such was the fascination and the deep friendship of these two guys, very easy to the eye, that the sparks of lust between Jack and the girl - let's call her Holly - nearly went unnoticed.

Holly kept to herself, her feelings bottled tight inside her chest, holding hard to her discrete nature, while Jack let the pressure out joking with Nate. Though most likely their affair never went past repressed desires, hushed conversations, touching of hands under the table at meetings, and maybe a peck or two shared in the frame of intense guilt regarding their families, when Holly got a chance to work somewhere else, she was quick to take it. The tiny flame was put off fast, before any charring could give away what some saw and everybody kept silent.

Well, it happens. How many of us have been in a situation where your hormones speak louder than you reason, where your anatomy pushes you where your morals forbid you? The heated glances shared with the friend of your significant other, the significant other of your friend, the married friend, the student or professor, the provider or customer of your company, with whom any form of fraternalization is enough to issue your pink slip. Yes, they are human, live, legal and conscenting, but there are moral matters that forbid the contact. We call them forbidden affairs. We know about them, movies and books are done about them, but basically we don't approve them, which is why they become a problem and why we do all we can to avoid them.

The fire was supposed to have been dead in Holly, but the staircase said something else. Hidden in the hideous walls of the concrete tube, she hoisted her phone close to her ear, half hugging herself, hugging the phone, while she laughed and glowed phosphorescent under the hurting artificial light. Leaning against the wall, she floated like a mermaid, her hair shining, her honey eyes flowing about the space as she spoke with who seemed to be her universe. Love was think around her, pouring out of her body making her a goddess. Fair Freya, enchanting Aphrodite, her laugher was made of the arrows of Eros, and her softness and abandon enveloped the surroundings making them paradise. And in that paradise, lost as she was for over half an hour, she never noticed that concrete was concrete, manmade and harsh, unmoving and unchanged by emotions, and making a hard box around herself, sounds were amplified and so the voice of her One reverberated inside the tube. Words were masked, but that soft voice with the gentle slurr or a particular provincial accent was clear: it was Jack molding this discrete, gentle woman into a powerful goddess of love that could strike anyone's heart with the power of the magic awakened inside her.

What was happening there? Two people trapped in the ropes of marriage, with children of their own, part of a family, chained down by social forms, have reached across in one of the forbidden paths walked by many, and have found fire. Fire they seek to jump into, desperately wishing their meat burned off their bones in the licks of flames, grasp of smoke and thrust of snapping embers. What then? How do you proceed with your life? What decisions do you make? What decisions can be afforded to make?

Love, lust... whatever it is, it's strong enough to command you, push you, move you. Many try to kill the feeling by the mean of words and empty reasoning. "It's just lust", "You'll regret it later", "it's not real", "it's just a fling"... Falsely diminishing it isn't the way to go. We try to believe that love is one and precious, and though it is precious indeed, it's not one, but many, so why should we kill on love to allegedly preserve another? Love or lust, live it, even if you don't act upon it. Be Holly, wrap around it and glow, awake the Venus inside your chest, be god, goddess and fiend, angel and demon, human and divine, body and spirit. Ride the feeling and exhaust it.

Nate, the beautiful Nate, charming as he is, though have glowed shiny with Jack, has never illuminated the staircase the way Holly did. Better control? Maybe, but still, the magic Holly and Jack feed should be preserved, and should make us think all about where do we take our lives and what are we allowing to lead our vital decisions.