you build me up, buttercup.

Today I was in an elevator.

*hold for applause*

And there was a man in the elevator too.

*the man gets no applause because this is not his blog*

He had bright orange hair and we immediately had a connection; the kind that can only be shared by two people whose hair color comes out of a bottle.

But this man stood out because he started talking with me. And see that preposition? With. Not at. I think that it is easy to talk at people. To just go down the laundry list of things to say, making it so that it really doesn’t matter who it is that you are talking to, the other person has so little to do with the shape of the conversation.

But this orange haired man, he was looking at me and asking me if I was going to an audition, among other things. He was smiling kindly and included the maid in that smile as soon as she stepped into the elevator with us.

*you may applaud the maid because she seemed to have a hard day today and could use a few “bravos!” in her life*

She looked tired and worn down.  She had about a billion toilet paper rolls on her cart and started telling us that she had many bathrooms to fill with them, once the orange haired man asked her how she was doing. But then he did something else: he encouraged her. He asked her what time she gets off work, and once she told him, reminded her that she had just two more hours to go in a way that told her he knew she could do it.

And I believed him that he believed in her, as strange as that sounds.

Or maybe as unimportant as that sounds. A stranger encouraging a maid that she was almost done work–maybe that sounds dismissable. But I think for the maid it was not and isn’t it true that if you want to encourage the world, then you start with the person standing right next to you?

The maid juggling all that toilet paper.

Or the quiet girl standing in the elevator with you, orange backpack heavy on her back and maybe looking a tiny bit nervous.

Maybe you tell her right before she steps off on the seventh floor that you think she’s going to get the job.

And suddenly there are two people in that elevator who are believed in.

And I think words are weighty. I don’t think I always live like I think this, but I’d like to. I think I understand the weight and power of words when writing a song a little better. Because, see, songs–in comparison to life–have so few words. So each one has to be measured and weighed and compared and contrasted and stripped down to its raw meaning and then decided upon because yes, that’s exactly what I want to say.

And maybe life should be more like that, too.

What kind of song am I singing?

I’d like it to be a good one. Not good as in always pretty or happy or anything so boring as always the same thing, necessarily; but good. Building up this world that gets torn down, person by person, until it’s very hard to remember what it was like to not get that metallic taste of panic on your tongue as soon as anyone starts to whisper. Because God forbid a secret is ever actually a lovely thing to discover.

Remember that?

When secrets could be good and beautiful; a garden enclosed that was fairer than the walls all around it had pretended it to be.

That was nice.

And not over, though I wasn’t always so sure it wasn’t.

But yes, the orange haired man reminded me of Jesus some, I think. At least in the way that he saw people as unique and interesting and worth discovering and encouraging.

And even believing in.