On the Escalator That Never Gets Fixed

What is a draft but a staircase mid-repair,
steps you build while still walking there?
The words keep moving, the shape keeps changing—
who's doing the labor, and who's just arranging?

The escalator at L'Enfant Plaza has been broken, in one direction or another, for something like six years, maybe seven. Not the whole time, obviously; they fix it, it runs for a while, something groans wrong deep in its gears, and it's roped off again with yellow tape that's gone the color of an old banana. This morning one is roped off entirely, and the other just sits there, paused, doing an impression of a staircase. I look up along with the other commuters, and we all quietly start the trek — about 110 steps, one at a time, in a suit that was fine twenty minutes ago. Outside it's 85 degrees at 8:40 a.m., unusual even for a D.C. July, and I can feel that heat already in the underground before I've climbed a third of the way. It's the kind of heat that shows up early and makes everyone look personally betrayed by their own commute.

By the time I reach the plaza, my shirt is stuck to my back in a way I'll spend the rest of the walk to the office trying to un-stick, and I'm wondering, honestly wondering, why this is happening to me .. as if 110 steps and 85 degrees and a suit weren't a fairly obvious equation. As if my body needed to consult me first before deciding to sweat through a blazer I bought specifically because the label said breathable. It hasn't been. Heart going a little fast. Legs that refuse to climb properly, out of practice, used to the luxury of standing still and letting the machine do the work.

And somewhere around step 60, I start thinking about how I write. Strange topic, strange time. That's how I work, apparently .. the mind wanders off exactly when the body is busy elsewhere.

There was a version of me — not that long ago, actually, just a few years, though it already feels geologic — who wrote the way you'd expect someone to write before there was any other way to do it. An idea would show up, usually while doing something unrelated, like waiting for a train that was itself running on its own broken schedule. Then a draft, slow and lumpy, full of sentences that sounded right in my head and wrong on the page. Then the editing, which was really the whole job .. weeks of it sometimes, moving a paragraph here, cutting one there, saying a sentence out loud until it stopped sounding like something a stranger wrote. One essay a year. Maybe two. Each one built the way you'd build a house if you only had a hammer and were, frankly, kind of bad with a hammer.

I don't write that way anymore, and I notice I'm a little embarrassed to say so .. the way you're embarrassed to admit you take the elevator now instead of the stairs, even though the stairs are right there and always were. Somewhere along the way .. 2024, oddly specific as it sounds, the way people are oddly precise about small personal turning points .. an editor moved in. Not a person. Something more like a very patient, very fast collaborator who never tires of my third attempt at a sentence and never once suggests we just leave it and go get a beer instead — an AI, though it took me a while to just say that plainly. I still have the idea. The idea is unmistakably mine, the way the decision to take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator is mine. But everything after the idea moves differently now. Rearranging, testing, trying the sentence backwards just to see .. what used to take a season now takes an afternoon.

Is that cheating? Some part of me wants writing to still be effortful in the old way, the way this escalator is effortful, because there's a kind of moral clarity in something being hard on purpose. If it was slow before, and it's fast now, and the thing that comes out the other end still sounds like me .. is the speed the problem, or is it just that I've confused suffering with authorship for so long I don't know how to tell them apart?

I don't actually think anyone at L'Enfant Plaza believes the broken escalator makes the trip more meaningful. I think everyone standing at the bottom of those 110 steps at 8:40 in the morning, sweating faintly, wishes it worked. And yet I noticed something today, climbing it anyway: I wasn't just annoyed. I was, in some small and slightly pathetic way, paying more attention than I would have on the escalator .. to the people around me, to the specific ache behind my knee on step 40. The slow version made me look around. The fast version, most days, just gets me to the plaza.

Maybe that's not an answer so much as an observation, and maybe I'm allowed to leave it there. The escalator's still broken. I still don't know what year they'll actually fix it, if ever. I walked into my office, sat down, and started drafting this on my phone before I'd even caught my breath .. no editor, no second pass, just the old way, the slow way, the way I said I didn't write anymore. Maybe that's the tell. Maybe some ideas still want to be carried up the stairs themselves