meditation on doors

doors are like chambers in the heart; they open and close, open and close in unending chasms of light.

***

it's been days, maybe several days or weeks. it could have been months or years even. ten, twenty, time seems retracted and slow. i am staring down the barrel of the past, waiting for the hammer to hit. but it never does. perhaps this is my prison, forced to remember the things i can't seem to forget.

i wrote myself a note yesterday morning reminding myself to forget but i forgot the note and ended up remembering anyway. it feels like yesterday, when that whole thing happened, like a drunken sleep where you wake up more shaky than when you first entered the unconscious. it causes you to wonder if you slept at all.

i don't sleep anymore. i remember. i dream and replay the same story and each time i try to change things, my eyes snap open and i've wet the bed again.

it started with a door, an unassuming door with a light gloss to it and green trim. the daylight was sweltering and my uniform stuck to my back. i was somewhat ambivalent about being there. something didn't feel real or something didn't feel right.

i didn't knock. i didn't have to, this was war after all and all pleasantries are thrown out the proverbial and literal window. i turned the knob as simple as i would flip a pancake.

he was fat and sloppy looking and the fact that he was in his underwear made me feel a little embarrassed for him. i watched him drop to his knees and he started to speak. i didn't hear a word and even if i could have heard him i wouldn't understand what he was saying. i had long lost the ability to understand human pleas. he held his hands up in the air. he was unarmed. in fact, he was having breakfast, a light meal of fruit and tea. i let him move his jaw around a bit i felt like i was doing him a service by giving him hope. after all, what is there for the human race if not hope? but this was a farce. i intended and in fact was required by the government to end his life. i pointed my rifle at him as simple as a lover leveling a dozen roses before his valentine. i saw his head blooming with red rose pedals as he slumped to the floor. it was quick, i made sure of it. i may be a killer but i'm not cruel.

then i saw her, or rather i heard her. a scream. i turned. she stood barely three and a half feet tall. she was wailing and pointing a virtuous index finger at me. whatever feeling i thought i had lost came racing back into me and i felt remorse. remorse unparalleled to any i had know and have ever known since. she looked like a little girl i would call my own. she looked like everything beautiful and bright and i had put a black smudge on her innocent little life. i had poisoned the garden, had slit the throat of the pure.

i set my gun down next to her and walked slowly toward the front door as calm and quiet as i entered. i hoped she would kill me, i hoped that i would be paralyzed at least. i gave her the chance for vengeance and she spared me. i closed the door lightly, sealing inside that humble home, my heart, my conscious, my every waking moment.

***

the sun is etching ghost-like patterns on the ground and i am thinking of you. i am remembering how you used to trace your shadow on the wall and would be aghast when you couldn't pinpoint your hand. things were always moving and even in trying to fix yourself, you discovered that few things in life are as easy as the turkey hand drawing you did in the second grade. i loved you, you know? i really loved you to the point that when i said it, it felt like the first words i had ever spoken, that all other language was babble. i meant it, you know? i meant it from some place in my chest, someplace where such inexplicable pangs live, where matter begins and where it will end, in that place i loved you. but you love shadows and playing on light shifting between trees on that near invisible edge where things constantly are born and die in less than a second. i thought that perhaps you could find me a constant, a port to come home to, a house, a door to step through as you laid your tired cries into my chest.

when you left it felt sudden like the jolt of a massive wake on a placid lake, or the curtain drawing down hard on an awestruck audience, or perhaps, more accurately, the slam of a door. i loved you, you know that? i loved you and i learned from you. i learned that if there's one thing i must never be, it's a door. doors are walked through, they bring you to something else, they let you in or shut you out. but doors do not exist as a place unto themselves. doors cannot be lived in. you cannot breathe your dreams into a door. you cannot hold a door or carry on a conversation with one. doors are short lived experiences. they are portals, instruments of movement. i was a door in your life, a second, a flicker of semi-fanciful light that caught your eye when you were dancing on the edge. i was something you passed through to get somewhere else. i was opened and closed in a blink of a light.