Exit stage left
03 August 2011 06:23 AM Categories: Writing prompts
The kitchen has a door to the back deck. The hallway has a door to the deck. The back room has a set of French doors that lead to the deck. Our stairway has a door, too. None of these doors are solid, they are transparent, glass-paned, they let in light and a view and keep things airy. We live in a house of glass thresholds, where supposedly there are no secrets, but some of the doors are covered over, in film, in fabric, the crannies of hidden disorganization, the jammed rooms and closets and the places where private things go on.
Someday one of us will open the front door and walk away. That one of us, the she or the he, will carry his or her life on his or her back. I used to have just enough stuff, enough belongings, to fit into a car, and then it became a small truck, and now our things intermingle. They traveled across the country a little over four years ago in a massive truck. Slowly we’ve been acquiring more as we’ve also slowing been shedding the old, the clothes from fifteen years ago, the things that are no longer age-appropriate for the kid.
What do I stake a claim to here? Almost all of it is us. I imagine the men, anonymous in their jeans and sweaty t-shirts or their incongruous bland blue uniforms, moving the boxes out. One of us, the he or the she, is crying or trying not to cry, and the other one, the she or the he, is maybe not even here, or is on the phone in the yard, or pacing in front of the privacy fence, one hand gesturing, the phone crooked between chin and shoulder.
Someday, we will divide these things. The door will become someone else’s entry. I will walk or drive or be driven past the house, will note the new trim, the bikes locked on the porch, will see how someone else has taken this shell of a house and made it theirs. The new folks won’t know our story, or the story of the people who went here before us. The house will be wiped clean of context, ready to be painted with fresh emotion.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The main door to the house is to my left. The heat hums in the corner. I have a cat behind me and a cat beside me, two lightly snoring sleepers. Nothing has changed and yet everything may be different, unless I can score a lucky card today, or this week, unless someone yanks our arms and pulls us away from the precipice, a good Samaritan, one who knows the worth of one plus one plus one plus history and heartbeat and shared brainwaves against just enough doubt to make it all feel impossible.
From the prompt "Walk through the door."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by *Fede*.
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