Memoir Blast #14 — The Lift, the Stairs, and the Boy Who Stayed in My Head

 

Memory Blast 14 — The Lift, the Stairs, and the Boy Who Stayed in My Head

I was eighteen and heavily pregnant, working on the ground floor of Debenham's on the old High Street, before the Oracle existed. Eight floors of staff stairs, one staff lift you weren’t supposed to use, and me — breathless, anxious, scared of early labour, and scared of lifts too. That trapped no air feeling I still don’t have the right word for.

But before that: 1987.

I was thirteen and in love with Steven from school. Glasses pushed up with his middle finger, tall, basketball lean — actually playing with a hoop, while I tried to be the distraction. If this were now, the soundtrack would be that baseball game Twilight song (the one that becomes an earworm the second you think of it).

He was dreamy in that way a crush can take over your whole head. In my imagination I’d already married him, taken his surname, lived the whole story. Teenage hormones and daydreams are powerful things.

I think he asked me out once.

I think I said no because I was terrified.

I think I asked him out in my head.

We hovered around each other in that almost something way where nothing happens but everything feels like it is.

Fast forward five years — which, in youth, feels like an eternity.

Our names “loved each other” 98% — that ridiculous schoolgirl thing of the 80s where you added the letters together to get a score. FML. Poor girls.

Now I’m at work, pregnant, exhausted, choosing between the stairs (risk: breathless, panic, maybe contractions) or the lift (risk: trapped, panic, no air).

I choose the lift.

The doors open.

And there he is.

Taller. Handsomer. Every feature memorised, even more glorious. In an instant I was back to thirteen — all nerves, all hope, all imaginary imagination — and then reality hit. His eyes met mine, he recognised me, and then his gaze dropped to my stomach.

The mortification was instant.

The innocence I’d attached to that old crush just… left the building. I forgot my whole predicament — the child within me, literally and metaphorically — and all I felt was embarrassment. Not the version of me I’d kept safe in my head.

I turned and ran.

Took the stairs anyway.

Eight floors.

Breathless.

Mortified.

Gone.

I told myself he didn’t see the pregnant me.

I told myself he saw the thirteen year old version — the happy, bouncy one I’d kept safe in my imagination. Because that memory was mine, and it was good, and I didn’t want it rewritten.

The walk could have been is always better than the reality.

(The what could have been.)

And the irony?

I was pregnant by a Stephen — just not the dreamy one.