Ten Feet

There's a photo at the top of our staircase. Canvas print, black and white, and yes by most measures, depressing. A man, balding, long gray beard, clothes that were never his, hanging off a frame they were never meant for. A cigarette dangles low in one hand, a lighter clutched tight in the other like it might be the last thing he owns worth holding onto. His head is down. Chin to chest. The posture of a man who has made some kind of private peace with being invisible.

Ten feet above him, Pike Place Market is doing what Pike Place Market does; tourists, salmon throwing, noise, life in all its loud and oblivious glory. Ten feet. It might as well be a different planet.

I took that photo in 2011 at a time where quite honestly I could have been teetering on exactly what I was looking at down the barrel of the lens. Fresh off a divorce, with a bank account so empty that my debit card was essentially a strongly worded suggestion. I wasn't unhoused, but I was one misstep from it. Every night this photo is one of the last things I see before bed.

People ask about it sometimes. You can watch them doing the math, trying to figure out what kind of person deliberately hangs something like that at the top of their stairs. What kind of person chooses that as the last image of the day. I understand the question. It's a reasonable question.

I am, it turns out, exactly that kind of person. The photo isn't alone in this. On my forearm sits a tattoo, a symbol from a band that has meant more to me than I could adequately explain to anyone who didn't already understand it. The symbol itself is ambiguous by design. Depending on who's reading it, depending on the day, depending on what you're carrying when you look at it, it can mean something hopeful or something considerably darker. People ask about that too. I don't always give the same answer, because the answer isn't always the same.

What both things share, the photo at the top of the stairs and the ink on my arm, is that they're not decoration. They're not conversation pieces, though they reliably start conversations. They're reminders. Deliberately chosen, permanently positioned anchors to something I don't want to drift too far from. The idea that things can go sideways. That they nearly did. That the version of my life I'm currently living wasn't the only version available to me in 2011.

But the intention was never beauty, even if to me it's one of the most beautiful photographs I've ever taken. There's a difference between a photo that makes you feel good and a photo that makes you feel something true. This one makes me feel something true every single time.

What it is, every night without exception, is a few seconds of enforced silence in a world that doesn't make much room for it. A hard stop. A moment where the day's noise, whatever it was, falls away, and I find myself back on that street in 2011 wondering about him. Who he was. What sequence of events, decisions, disasters, or simple unremarkable bad luck had landed him there, ten feet below the tourists and the salmon and the noise, likely fighting something invisible and exhausting and entirely his own. What was actually going through his head at the exact moment I pressed the shutter. Whether he knew I was there at all.

I never found out. I never tried. That sits with me too.

I stumbled into a good life. That's the only honest way to put it. A nerdy obsession I picked up late in high school turned into a career, turned into comfort, turned into the kind of existence where Spain becomes a realistic conversation. I didn't engineer that with some grand vision. There was no five year plan, no whiteboard full of goals, no mentor who saw something in me that I couldn't yet see in myself. I got lucky, repeatedly, in ways I didn't fully appreciate until I was old enough to look back and feel the full weight of it.

And let's be clear about something. I didn't out-work anyone. I want to be precise about that because the myth of the self made man is one of the more destructive stories we tell ourselves in this country. I sat at a desk. I stared at screens. I solved problems that, in the grand honest spectrum of human labor, were never going to break my body or shorten my life. Nobody was depending on my physical output to feed their family that night. I wasn't laying pipe in January or pulling double shifts on a floor that smelled like grease and exhaustion. I typed. I thought. I got paid extraordinarily well for both. The idea that I earned this through some superior effort or discipline is a story I could tell myself, and it would be a comfortable one. It would just be wrong.

That photo won't let me forget that.

I grew up in the Midwest, where humility isn't a virtue so much as it's just the water you swim in. Where you're close enough to real hardship that you never fully convince yourself you're immune to it. That man in the photo could have been any number of people I grew up around. Could have been, under a different set of circumstances, someone a lot closer to home than I'd like to admit.

And so every night, for just a moment, the noise of the world, the grievances, the outrage, the endless ticker tape of who wronged whom today, goes quiet. And I just stand there at the top of the stairs, saying nothing. Kept honest, every single night, by a man whose name I never knew.