The stairway is a box that

There was a cryptic note yesterday in the staircase in the ArtsOne building where the Department of Drama is (one of the great perks of working in exciting theatre departments is that strange little projects have a higher probability of popping up around one).

It said something like "A stairway is

a box where you throw your takeaway coffee cups."

It was gone a few hours later (and I even discovered why it came to be there) but today I was walking up the staircase and as I reached the top where Drama is (it sounds so funny! "DRAMA is there!" "The Department of Drama" like some surreal government office.)

as I summited the stairs, I was suddenly shocked:
It's so familiar. This is my routine. This is my job, my life. I do this all the time. These stairs are familiar stairs. This blue carpet square pattern is behind the office door, it leads to the "pigeonholes" as we call the mailboxes, and the kettle and the endless Earl Grey I drink. This is familiar, this is my life.

And I missed you. I felt keenly, carved precisely out of me all the rest of you who aren't in this verse of my life. Who I sincerely hope will come back in at the chorus. There were suddenly vacuum spaces in me the shape of friends and family, close ones and not-so-close ones, all of you who've been a part of my routine, my orbit, before.
I miss you. I thought of you in Kansas, California, Abu Dhabi, Japan, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado, Germany, Poland, Finland, China, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Malaysia, Ohio. And more. I thought of you. I thought of you specifically and I thought of You generally and I miss you.

I thought (again, as I so often have before) of how strange it is to be strung all over the world. I miss you. I hope to see you soon.