The Door Between - Chapter One

For My First Paid Subscriber, The Lovely Happy Nielsen

I watch the leaves scatter in the wind and wish I could be swept away with them. Sunbeams dance against the stone steps carved into the earth, awakening in me a persistent desire to draw back into the shadows. I am fixed to the very spot I long to escape, riveted in place as the Green fills with bodies and I am left with the knowledge that there is no part of this I can stop. No way to unbind time or reach beyond the finality of this moment to undo what I have done.

It plagues me now, the question that always seeps into the front of my mind during times such as this. It’s the whisper in my ear, asking if that smile of theirs is fake. If, in their last few minutes in this world, they truly find the strength within them to bear the weight of the unknown. No matter whether chosen or not, uncertainty will always ring cold and close, a touch of the vast expanse of everything that cannot be known.

Whether a child chooses to take the final steps or is carried to the very threshold, they never thank you for forcing them over a cliff. They do not lift their heads or square their shoulders. They do not rejoice in being abandoned. Yet, when faced with the gravity of the situation and the needling stares, they all smile as they walk through the Door, even if moments before they screamed as they were dragged to its foot.

Every Departure is the same. They are there one moment, then gone the next. It takes only one blink, one final breath as the hinges squeak and the cold rush prickles our skin, the smell of forgotten things left dying in the dark rushing toward us in a gust, for them to be no more. Abandoned to the unknown. Left to the mercy of a Door that knows none. They become neither here nor there, simply gone. Another missing piece of the whole, beyond the reach of those who would have fought for them in another world. A different world.