Fire Escapes

Very recently I have been contemplating fire escapes. Two nights ago I started questioning the true purpose of fire escapes, thus questioning the name we have given them. How often do we really use them to escape fires? Generally, we use them to briefly escape our lives, “take a breather” as they say. We’ll sit on the steps, gaze into the simplicity of our surroundings and everything else during those few moments, no matter how weighty, seems to be put on pause. You can let your mind wander freely or choose to put it to rest and shut yourself off completely. You admire the black paint peeling off the railing, revealing an old coat of red underneath. You admire the cracked cement in-between the red bricks to which the fire escape is bolted. Then you turn back to the peeling paint and start pulling back the strips when suddenly your mind is brought back to your youth. Back to a time when you used to peel the white paint off your parents’ porch, revealing a coat of grey. You did this out of sheer boredom. The same actions can have very different purposes at different stages of our lives. Back then you did it to kill time, now you do it to escape time, to escape reality. Is a fire escape in actuality a reality escape?
You stop moving for a few minutes and that’s when the motion detector light clicks off. You are now plunged into darkness except for the glow of a distant street lamp at the end of an alley. All the reasons why you came out for some air in the first place come flooding back into your mind: all the fires people keep lighting underneath you, their smoke overwhelming you, choking you. You ran to the fire escape to clear your head from the intoxication. People can be so intoxicating. Seems as though at the end of it all, the name fire escape does do them justice, because we all have fires in our lives we need to escape from.