wordspill: down the staircases

When you spend your days tramping up and down staircases, in and out your apartment, to and from the gardens where you work, you always get so exhausted that you never notice anything around you. Just keep your eyes on your feet, stepping down, shuffling forward, keeping your balance, never falling. Always look down, don’t look around.
But when you see feet passing you- feet on the wrong side of steps- you tend to look up. Or at least forward.
I did. I saw someone horizontal to my vertical, not falling backward in anyway. Most disconcerting.
That day, as always, I ought to have been working. Instead I found myself continuously making excuses, dashing inside on some pretext or other, examining the stairs and the walls and the drop that lay beyond the railings. A wondrous world I saw, made of fleeting glances and half-remembered peeks that preoccupied me even through my work. When at last it came time to return home, I was not as weary as usual. Thus I decided to return to my room, and instead of sleeping, wait until dark, and then sneak out to explore this strange citadel which I had grown up in, and never thought to question.
I began with the steps on which I first saw the stranger. Carefully, I oriented myself on the floor, such that I would ‘step’ on the same side as he had done. I stepped forward and-
Fell flat on my back. I gritted my teeth. Clearly this was no simple maneuver to undertake.
Leaving the steps aside, I explored further than the corridors and staircases so familiar to me.
Walking down a stair, I glanced upward to find a banister hanging like icicles on the underside- it seemed to my mental map- of the stairs above. Obviously, more must orient themselves such ways, upside-down. Hence I set out, not to forcibly stand as they did in the hold of some peculiar gravity, but to see what was hidden by them, their secrets, what was not known to me and mine.
Standing on their walls, hanging from their banisters, stealing food from their peculiar ceiling tables- such diverting activities. And down the staircases I went.