THE ECHO

by Drew Paradise

There’s a sad kind of irony in the way that something as useful as a staircase can survive so far into its own obsolescence that it becomes something less than useless: an obstacle, a place one only reaches by accident. This has been the fate of E stairwell. There is no place that E stairwell can take you that can’t be reached more efficiently another way. As building expansions over the years brought better stairs for better access to better halls, E stair became Avon High School’s proverbial “over there,” a place you had no reason to be. Yet here I am, in the 11^th hour of my final year of high school, memories of this empty place rushing back to me.

September 2021. I am 14 years old. In E stairwell the sun is crashing down through floor-to-ceiling windows below the balcony, where this ghiblian scene has halted me. I’m young, insecure; terrified of crowds. This empty corner of the building, however, is quiet. The only thing that can see me here is the freshly-installed security camera, put up to deter the reason behind this place’s former infamy as “makeout hall.” But last years’ delinquent senior boys and their girlfriends are gone and graduated, leaving behind this quiet corner for me to hide in. I earn my first tardy of high school looking out the window in E stairwell, somewhere I’d return almost every day of my freshman year.

August 2022. In three weeks I’ll be 16. I’m sitting at the base of that massive window drinking iced tea, passing the time before classes start. At my side is my first boyfriend, laying his head on my shoulder. We’ve been together for a few weeks. Being alone had, for the first time in either of our lives, become a choice; one which we declined at every opportunity. In hindsight this is all an incredibly juvenile thing to do, I suppose. Being two very juvenile people at the time, there was a kind of happiness in that. We’d meet there every morning of our sophomore year, under the light of the E stairwell window, and enjoy our mutual ignorance to the passage of time.

October 2023. I’ve just turned 17. The weather has started to grow cold. I take the E stairwell down from English on my way to the bus to find that the window is no longer there. They’ve bricked up the wound it left in the wall with cinderblocks, lined up in the center of the yellow walls like a big stone dental crown. The boy I once sat with in this stairwell has freshly ended things, and in accordance with his glaring absence, something was gone from E stairwell too. I try to sit down in the place I used to take when we’d meet here, but there is no longer room for me.

Now, as I write this essay from the stairwell, it is May of 2025, and I have been 18 for eight months. I’m listening to the voice of Conor Oberst and wondering what to feel about this whole thing. This year they painted over the cinderblocks that replaced the window, and unless you’d seen it before, you’d think it had always looked this way. Usually these stories about the passage of time and when we’re first confronted by it end on a hopeful note. I suppose I expected to find a pile of ashes at the end of this story that a phoenix might rise up from some day, a sign that the cycle of good times and their end was soon to repeat. And while I have hope, the ambiguity of what exactly lies ahead worries me, and that worrying makes me tired. Tired of uncertainty, tired of change. It’s difficult to keep up the hope required to move on from this place – from E stairwell – where the good times started but aren’t anymore. I’m remembering, though, what Oberst sings in “Land Locked Blues,” in a conversation with the reaper:

“You’ll be free, child, when you have died,
From the shackles of language and measurable time
And then we can trade places,
play musical graves;
till then: walk away, walk away.”