The Ladders

Was I in love with her?
Was I in love with her because she was so beautiful?
Was I in love with her because she was so different to anyone else I had ever met?
Was I in love with her because she was so happy to be alive and loved everything, including me?
Was I in love with her because she showed me the ladders?

She was younger than me, she was petite, blonde and beautiful. I had only known her for a day or two. In everything she did she seemed to know just a little more than everyone else, like she had done it all before. We were up in the hills above the city at a look-out, looking out over the city but she wasn't looking at the city. She was scouring the view for something...
"There's one," she yelled and immediately jumped over the fence and down the rather steep hillside. I followed her, trying to keep up and not slip and fall down the slope and end up in a heap way down below. She suddenly stopped and looked straight up.
"I found one," she screamed at me without diverting her gaze from the clouds.
"Just what have you found?" I asked, wondering what could have caused all this excitement like she was five years old on Christmas morning.
"Come here, can you see it? Here!" She was holding the end of a piece of string that she handed to me. The string was hanging vertically, it appeared to stretch all the way up to the clouds.
"No one sees them unless someone points them out to them. Then you see them everywhere."
"But what are they connected to? How high do they go?" I was full of so many questions.
"Pull it down," she said while giving a demonstration of what I should do.

So I started pulling and, as I pulled, the string became rope and when I looked up I could see the rope was pulling some sort of shiny aluminium ladder from the sky. After a while the ladder had reached the ground at our feet and stretched all the way up to the clouds. Each rung was like a large silver inverted "U" shape.
"Well, let's climb." she said as if it was the most obvious course of action.
"But where... how... This can't..." I could not form sentences let alone thoughts. It was all so unreal. It was all so impossible.
She started climbing, not worrying that her short summer dress was not really appropriate for a long ladder climb. So I followed, of course. The unreality, the strange phenomenon, the adventure, the excitement, the girl... I just climbed, not knowing what was to come, but there was no way I wasn't going to find out.