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Inside, it smelled like turpentine and dust and something electric, like the air before a storm. Canvases leaned against brick walls three deep. Some were finished, others abandoned mid-thought—half a face, a single furious brushstroke, a sky with no ground beneath it.
And in the center of it all stood a staircase.
It didn’t match the rest of the warehouse. The steps weren’t wood or metal, but thick slabs of reclaimed planks painted in colors so vivid they seemed wet. Crimson. Teal. Mustard. Fuchsia. Each step a different shade, layered with drips, fingerprints, and the ghosts of old decisions.
Kate had built them during a winter when she couldn’t paint.
She had tried. She’d stretched canvas after canvas, stared at blank white until her eyes watered. Nothing came. The ideas that used to arrive like birds now hovered just out of reach.
So instead of painting pictures, she painted steps.
The first one she coated in a cheery mustard—the color of sunflowers, faces toward the sun. She scrawled across it in charcoal: BEGIN ANYWAY.
The next was dusky blue, calm and quiet, as it fades into the night. Then a bittersweet orange she mixed herself, the color of a Halloween pumpkin. She didn’t plan the order. She let instinct choose.
When the staircase was finished, it rose from the concrete floor to the warehouse’s second level—a rickety loft cluttered with old frames and forgotten sculptures. It wasn’t a grand staircase. It wobbled slightly if you climbed too fast. But it blazed against the warehouse’s gray like a rebellion.
One evening, long after sunset, Kate stood at the bottom of the steps with a paint-streaked rag in her hand.
She hadn’t created anything in months.
The warehouse felt like a witness to her silence.
She placed her foot on the ultramarine step.
BEGIN ANYWAY.
She climbed to the blue. Her heart thudded a little harder.
On the orange step, she remembered the first mural she ever painted, how her hands shook and how she’d painted anyway.
On the lime green step, she laughed out loud—suddenly aware of how seriously she’d been taking her fear.
By the time she reached the loft, something had shifted. Not inspiration exactly. Not a lightning bolt.
But a loosening.
She looked down at the staircase from above. The colors weren’t random after all. They were a record of motion. Of showing up. Of painting something—anything—when the mind felt empty.
She went back down.
Instead of facing the blank canvas, she carried one of the colorful planks to her easel. She set it upright and began to paint over it, not covering the old layers but working with them. The red bled through. The charcoal words smudged into shadow. The drips became rain in a cityscape she hadn’t known she was carrying inside her.
By morning, there was a finished piece leaning against the wall.
Not perfect. Not polished.
Alive.
The staircase remained in the center of the warehouse, paint-splattered and stubborn. Visitors who came later would run their fingers along the steps, asking if it was an installation.
Kate would shrug.
“It’s just how I get upstairs,” she’d say.
But sometimes, late at night, when the canvases went quiet and doubt crept back in, she would stand at the bottom of the colorful steps, look up at their reckless brightness, and remember:
Art didn’t have to arrive in a flash.
Sometimes it began with a single painted step.
BEGIN ANYWAY.
