Stairways to Enlightenment

Looking into the abyss.

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In the building where I work the elevator is still not working. I walk past it and try to ignore the “Out of Order” sign hanging in front of the black doors. In the morning when the sun is still trying to climb above the buildings and the first floor is still dark and shadowy, the elevator doors seem to be a hole, a dark tunnel, you can almost feel the void.

The building is old, it had been some sort of manufacturing facility. People say it had been home to a business that manufactured car-seat covers. For a time, they used the building housed a company that cut and assembled shoes.

This was before OSHA; worker safety was haphazard and occasional. There are scars scratched into what we call reality, you can’t always see them, but sometimes you can hear them.

For a long time, the area around the building was known as the warehouse district. It was filled with small companies, good jobs, affordable housing. People lived and raised families, it wasn’t paradise, but it was a community. The warehouses moved out to more sweeping, long, low buildings on the outer fringes of the city. Manufacturing moved, often overseas, technology took shoes and car-seat covers and moved them into bright new buildings, filled with modern equipment. Economy of scale…