The stairs stretched out in front of me, lines of perspective narrowing them to a dot in the distance. I looked behind me and saw even more stairs, stretching to unthinkable depths below. I picked up my feet wearily and continued to climb. Each step burned in my muscles, legs pumping to hoist my body higher and higher. Sweat started running down my chest and back. I sucked the air in and spat it back out, feverishly panting, mouth agape. My arms were swinging fast, then drooping more and more as time went on. I stopped for a moment and put my hands on my knees. Breathe.

I looked down the stairs and they were as endless as those that stretched in front of me. I kept climbing. Slower now, but deliberately, I planted each foot on the stair in front of me and hauled myself up after it. It seemed like days, without a break. My clothes were limp and dripping with sweat. My mouth was dry as cotton, and my hands had started to shake. But still I climbed. I had nearly given up, when I saw it from a distance. A platform. I kept climbing.

“I’m almost there.” I thought, and dragged myself up another stair. I could see that the platform stretched around to the back of the stairs. I wondered what it would look like from the other side. The underside of a neverending staircase. Every step cost more of my will, and by the time I reached the last one, I practically collapsed on the platform I’d been chasing. The world swam in front of my eyes, so I closed them. The wind whipped in my ears, but it wasn’t too long before the darkness took me, and shallowed me whole.

I was climbing a ladder, nearing the top of something. I climbed with curiosity, and reached the top. It was a park slide, but it was the longest slide I’d ever seen. The bottom was so far down, I wasn’t even sure if I was seeing it. I noticed my palms sweating and body started to shake. My God, I’ve never been so scared. I realized that I just couldn’t go down that slide. There way no way! I had to leave. I had to back out. I moved backward and started to put my feet back on the ladder, but I felt hands pushing me back, landing me even closer to the edge f the slide.

“Please! Let me get down.” I asked, but no matter how hard I tried to talk, the words came out feeble, weak, and nearly inaudible. The hands were relentless. I was moving closer and closer to the edge. I realized that I was going to go no matter what I did, so I grabbed the sides and pushed off.

I slid down the slide, gaining speed, but still not seeing the bottom. My mouth and eyes were wide open, breathless with the rush of freefall. I slide further and further, with no end in sight. But still, I felt a lightness, like my body was lifting off of the slide. As soon as I felt it, it got stronger, and a second later I flew upwards, leaving the slide behind, falling upwards, faster and faster into the endless sky.

I opened my eyes. I felt the corner of the stairs biting into my legs, draped as they were over the last few stairs I had managed to climb. I picked myself up off the platform floor, I felt a soreness in my legs and back like I’d never had before. The pain was nearly crippling. I hobbled down the length of the platform, leaving the stairs behind, and turned the corner. I walked around to the other side of the staircase. The underbelly looked just like the slide from my dream, and I felt a tinge of fear creeping into my heart. I shuffled along past the underside, and headed toward a door, set far off in the distance, at the other end of the platform’s walkway. Though I wasn’t sure I would make it, in time, I found myself opening those doors and going through them.