Pier + Staircase

IPRC Writing Night
*write a love or break up letter to a place

To the Pier Behind the Trees

You were a known secret to everyone at the resort., but a well kept secret none the less. Your wood boards in a different state of rot from the thick leafy green coverage that hid you. Ten different piers and us cousins rose earlier and earlier to fish the dead branches layering against your legs drown beneath the lake. I can feel the photograph my father took of us at the end of the pier, seared silhouette together against the sunset. Everything besides your path was branches, thick enough to climb and hide in, to crawl myself out fifteen, twenty, twenty five feet over the water, to spy the fish floating off the crib and pass casting instructions to my brother.
Your wood will never entirely rot, the branches sculpting your tunneled path. When they do replace a board, you don’t lose your secretiveness, still you are hidden despite someone else knowing the way to you. The fish will still dart between your legs, avoiding the bobbers pull and still I know this is the pier to fish from for a spell.

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*write of a place that doesn’t exist

What a simple turn of the staircase can lead you to. If instead of exiting the stairwell to the right, towards the over cramped office, the shelves begging to buckle under the weight of paper boxes, you simply took another step up and to the left. Then another and another step up. The wall meeting the ceiling will wipe away like a heat hallucination. You will find yourself at the actual top of the staircase and confronted with a new door to the third floor. A door that’s dated, a brass knob showing splotches of wear from the years of hands rubbing the, years turned.