It was dark.  The stairwell was empty.  It was coated in grime.  As I climbed, the grime readily rubbed off on my hands.  Step by step I laboured up. I was headed to a place of love, too the roof above.  The streets were below, the roof above.  The grime was made slippery in the snow and ice and the steps jagged and broken from misuse and lack of care.  There was worry there, fear, yet above freedom.  Below I saw the life I lived.  It was a lost life, of hammer and tongs, caves and tunnels, guns and knives, freedom and fear.  I had known this life.  Love was the farthest thing from my mind.  I had never met love.  I did not know her name.  Since the exile I had known no other way.  Walks down dark alleys.  Sleeping in winter snow.  Walking through drunken stupors. I had lived this life as a common urchin.  I had stumbled, I had wandered to places unkept where wild men lived and shared as brothers.  As I wandered I met many.  Druggies, drunks, perverts.  They spoke to me, protected me as I protected myself.  Then I met him, the devil himself.  He turned holy, inspiring me with his hell born speech.  He was the one in the bare room dressed in black, asking through gritted teeth if I had ever taken a life.  There I was lost, amidst dumpsters, where children lived in squalor and broken glass cut my feet.  Gang gatherings and dirty sidewalks surrounded my life. I expected to find respite, expected to find safety in this room yet ended up in what would be an extension of hell.  He was there.  He spoke pure evil.  His eyes glowed lidless, without pupils, bearing the depths of hell that infected his soul.  The boom box in the corner blared in silence.  A dresser, haphazardly ajar, bore nothing at all.  There was no joy in this room, no happiness, no safety.  Merely a ragged bed and that boombox and that dresser all empty.  I remember that boombox.  It was loud in its silence but you knew if it played, it would play drums from the deep.  Deep drums and the oncoming of fire and brimstone.  The steps led upward through a frigid wind.  The wind would tear through me, me turning and twisting, shaking, pulling my coverings close in against it.  Fearful dreams ran through me and I looked for a way to escape.  But there was no escape.  Hell was apon me.  The interminable steps led past a lighted window.  It was a window into the world, a world of money, influence, love.  A window of light, of a shining star.  Id heard of it.  Later I was taught by angels.  They spoke my name, but then all I knew was the wind and the cold and the grime on my hands, tar caked and dirty.  They did not seem to be mine.  The wind tore through me.  I slipped past the window, hood up, eyes slanted, hair askew, grime covering my hand, my hooded sweatshirt stained and spotted and worn from wear.  It kept me warm in a way you might not expect.  It was the uniform I had chosen in this time of fear.  It was memory, adventure, a way to escape connected.  Winter enveloped me.  In places, snow drifts rose to endless heights.  On the steps it lay six inches deep frozen in raw patches.   The higher I rose, the deeper it got.  My mismatched shoes soggy, my feet wet, I trudged through the snow to the sunshine above.  The climb was steep, the going treacherous, yet I knew, amidst the shifting wind a new day would beckon where I was Lord over the city; my domain, the streets I owned.  Above I could see my youth, a time of dream and hope, before the exile, the beatings, the loss of peace. Below I saw the streets and assured death.  As I climbed it warmed.  The sunshine was carried by the wind drying my sneakers, warming my brow.  There was comfort there despite the wind, comfort in the sunshine.  As I rose, i glimpsed the top most stair.  There snow turned to ice turned to water turned to dry flagstone.  With each step closer to the top I felt the warmth of the sun coming into my body.  It instilled me with joy.  It inspired something new, something friendlier and warm like good conversation or the wonder before the plunge.  The sun was nebulous.  Like life before birth, like a field full of daisies dancing beneath the stars, like the warmth after summer rain, it filled me with life, renewed me like new beginning or a never seen moment.   In it I found life,  like the words of the ancients, like the beginning, being, and the endlessness of time.  The last bit was the hardest.  Looking back I saw the steps, snow covered, grimy, dirty in the places where my footsteps broke through the crust.  They looked interminable, like they reached down to forever. Below, in the darkness, I could see them disappearing in the mist.  I knew what was below.  I had seen it before.  I remembered, the grime, the cold, the exile.  And I knew what was above, the sun's warmth, youth, and all that was. It was an ascension to heaven where all was possible.  The return to a refrain written by God.  The last step was the hardest.  I felt frozen, rooted in place.  Stasis consumed me.  Memories flashed before my eyes.  Then I saw the change.  The hoodie I shed, the empty room I left behind, the dumpsters, the snow giving way to sunshine, the drying flagstone, the summer sun shining as a warm wind tussled my hair.  It was a beginning and an end.  A forgetting of a past life and a creation of a new one.  One where the sun shone eternally, where love was feeling.  I had made it through the dark, through memory, the pain, to sunshine, to light and as far as the sun would shine I would stand basking in it, living in forever.  That forever would last eternal as love from above.  I would surge.  I would change.  I would grow and I would find my place and it would fit just so.  Hope consumed me and I was fulfilled.  I have met angels and love is there name.