Joris is a typical guy from modern-day Netherlands who heard a weird rumor about a magical staircase. Every time he goes up one flight, he finds himself a year younger. How far will he go? Write a story about Joris and his staircase.

Somehow Joris ended up on an internet message board that was so obscure he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. The message itself was vague and in two lines. “When you go up the stairs in this building, you get younger. Be careful.” It included the name of the building, which Joris recognized as a dilapidated structure in a dingy part of town. <br><br>He had no idea how to verify whether the message was real or not. It was probably a joke or maybe even a trap, but he was bored out of his mind and just wanted something to happen. He decided to go and see what he could find.<br><br>He arrived at the building on a wet and rainy afternoon. Part of the front had fallen away and it looked like it was only a matter of time before the whole thing came crashing down. He took a deep breath, decided to take his chances, and went inside. <br><br>To his surprise, he found a stairway that seemed sturdy enough. There was a flight of maybe ten steps leading up to a landing. At the landing, the stairs turned ninety degrees to the right and went up another ten steps. It repeated that pattern all the way up to the top. <br><br>He didn’t know what to do. Had he just been pranked? He decided to go one flight up and see if anything happened. The stairs creaked as he went up to the landing. When he turned the corner, he realized he didn’t know how he was supposed to tell if anything had happened. He would just have to go down and look in a mirror. It seemed like a lot of work, but he went ahead and did it. <br><br>When he came back down, he went into the first doorway he saw. It was some sort of abandoned office, but there was a mirror on the wall that seemed to still be intact. He stared at his reflection, turning his head from side to side. He had no idea what to look for. He looked exactly the same as before.<br><br>He thought he had been pranked until he noticed something. His hairline. It was ever so slightly higher than normal. It was subtle but unmistakable. The message had been right. It worked. <br><br>When he got home, his girlfriend was amazed at his hairline, which he had been complaining about for years. She kept asking him what product he had used, but he just smiled and told her it was a secret. <br><br>The next day, he went back to the building. He had never really thought about it, but he realized that he didn’t like being thirty years old. He had gone to university, got a degree in computer science, and got a good paying job. He had lived up to everyone else’s expectations but his own. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he was starting to think that maybe he wanted to be younger. <br><br>He went all the way to the top. Every time he turned a corner, he felt a slight tingling sensation in his scalp. It was subtle, but he would have noticed it if he had been paying attention the first time. By the time he got to the top, his hairline was back to where it was when he was just out of his teens. He was so happy that he just stayed up there for a while with his hands on the railing, grinning from ear to ear. <br><br>He stayed in his apartment for a week. He didn’t go back to work. He didn’t open the door for anyone. He just sat on the couch and watched T.V. When a notice came in the mail that he was fired, he didn’t care. When his girlfriend came to beg him to let her in so she could get her things, he ignored her. He was in heaven.<br><br>But devil-may-care was fun for a week. When the food cartons started to pile up, he knew he had to go home. But he didn’t want to go back to his apartment. So he went back to the building. <br><br>He went up all the way to the top again, and this time he felt a warm sensation on his face. Not burning, but like he was sitting next to a campfire. By the time he got down to the bottom, he could see in a broken mirror that he looked like a kid. His eyes were rounder and darker and his lips were wider and fuller. He recognized the face of the boy he used to be.<br><br>Over the next two weeks, he went up and down and up and down, each time going a little higher and a little lower. He had decided to go all the way back to his childhood, and each time he went, it got a little better. He discovered that he had been a happy child. He found that he loved to play outside. He learned to enjoy every phase of his childhood.<br><br>But he also learned some things that weren’t so good. When he was a teenager, he had been a bully. A couple of years younger than that, he used to be so scared of the dark that he couldn’t sleep unless someone was in the room with him. <br><br>He slowly worked his way back down until he was ten. He liked being a kid but he didn’t want to go back to being a little kid. He wanted to remember what it was like to be carefree but still know what he knew as an adult. So he stopped. <br><br>He went back to his apartment. Everything looked different. Everything felt different. He still remembered who he had been, but he wasn’t that person anymore. What would he do with his life? He had no idea, but he was excited to find out.<br><br>He went outside. The sky was bluer than it had ever been. The grass was greener. He took a deep breath of air. Everything was different.