A passage. A presence. A door.
Doors are places of doubt and belief. Where the tricksters linger. Where the deep-seated shifts of calamity and serendipity occur. Places of faith and trust and yearning. Places of disillusionment and discontent. A longing for somewhere else, for some place else, for something more.
Doors open and close. Conceal and reveal. “You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget”, Cormac McCarthy says, and there are doorways in between. Between memory and anticipation. Between hope and regret.
We are used to disappointment. It’s easy to recall. We remember doors locked and closed. Doors boarded up. Nailed shut. Some slammed in our face. The curtain of the great and powerful pulled back to reveal a fraud, a fleece, a shame. A crack in the door shatters the illusion. A veil of disaster and coal. The machinations of deceit. The mystery wasn't what it seemed. The wonder of the life you imagined was all just mirrors and smoke-screens.
We forget that some doors swing the other way, and when they do they swing wide.
Sometimes behind the simplest of sheers there is something left ajar. A passage. A presence. A door. An entryway to infinity and clarity. Vastness and enormity. The magic that holds the world together, that keeps us together. That binds us to something bigger, to one another, to ourselves. The exhilarating terror and charmed mechanics. An elaborate engine at the edge of ordinary being, that burns bright, that burns clean, that underlies everything. The steady patience of a simple machine. A pulley that holds a braided hope, that lifts the heavy dark and opens effortlessly. Where we can speak resurrected. Where resurrection speaks.
When we can bring about the doubt of one’s own reality, “even a little”, V.E. Schwab says, “we grant them hope for a different one”, a better one. One that doesn’t arrive or appear, but merely opens enough to show that it’s always been there. A better reality hidden all around us. Always available, right here.
In everything there is a door. Sometimes a person is the key. One person that unlatches everything.
I hope that I can be that person for you. You are that person for me.