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We really like staircases in big institutional buildings. This is one of the memories we have from college: we'd get into the academic buildings at 2 AM (there were tunnels under them, and so if any building had a door unlocked you could get into all of them through the tunnels) and we'd walk around in them alone. Mainly just to get the atmosphere. It's a very fun feeling to be in an abandoned building that hasn't died yet. But we'd also go look at what people drew and wrote on the walls, and we'd find all the staircases and go all the way down and all the way up. Just to see how they handled the act of ending. Some of them were cool about it, one had a kind of glass overlook pavilion with a locked door out onto the roof at the top. One in the tallest building had a landing that felt like nowhere, and someone had put a chair there as a joke.
What do you even do with this? It's such a strange thing to have a thing about. It's totally platonic, too. Like the gas masks thing is legible as freak shit, but this isn't even a sex thing! It's just an appreciation for institutional staircases and the personalities you can read into them, and into what people write and place on them.
Well, we can get fully weird about it. This is a case of the broader thing we have going on, the thing we liked so much about the rolling blackouts in the dorm buildings, the too quiet, air too still feeling. None of the expected flows of information are happening, but you can see the bones of what would usually carry them - that's what we mean by "how do they handle the act of ending".
What we have is a platonic (?) architectural necrophilia, an obsession with the interface between inside and outside, and how both misbehave and betray your expectations when the distinction breaks down. We are drunk on the quiet death of structure and the raw possibility it invites.