A Careful Knock

And when he left, he slammed the door. For all we knew there was nothing but darkness out there. Maybe it was cold - a vast nothing. Or like an empty shell. I'd never dared to venture out there myself. I'd never felt the need. I could never imagine the desire to leave this room. But he said he had something on the other side. He'd seen things, felt things. He'd felt the same safety I felt in this room. But we only had his word and sad eyes for it. We had to believe he was going to be alright. It took me a few days to get out of the shock I was in. Mother threw a mug at the door in anger when he left. She was always good at expressing herself whereas I retreated to the little nooks and corners of my mind where I could hide. Corners where I could hide from having to take action or having to deal with my surroundings. We circled around the table for days. All of us retreating to our seperate corners of the room. All trying to grasp what had happened. The fears, the worries, the anger. The table stood there in the middle of the room with all the chairs around it. Glaring at us. Almost like it was mocking us. There were days I wanted to burn his chair, to never give him the opportunity to sit down with us again. But I couldn't. I couldn't exterminate something that would always be a part of me. One day father silently put the chair in a corner. The dust would soon start to settle on the chair. None of us would touch it. It would just stand there under the big clock. I remember I started running. I ran faster and faster and I filled my life with all the joyful things I wanted to focus on. The room became full of bright colours, but the draught from underneath the door never seemed to stop coming in. Even on the warmest days your feet would sometimes feel the chill. The colours on the dusty chair got bleached by the sunlight. As the years starting to come and go, new little chairs were added to the table, but the dusty, bleached chair in the corner never left its spot. Sometimes I'd remember the pain from the early days. Pain like knitting needles being jabbed into my heart. Pain that planted itself in my stomach, clenched everything inside of me and started a roaring fire in my heart. A fire that created a deep and an almost uncontrollable urge to hurt him back. I remembered so clearly how pain would turn into anger and finally leave me gasping for air on the floor, filling my lungs with apathy in order to get up and keep painting the walls in the bright colours I'd needed to for so long. There were less and less of those incidents over the years and some days I forgot he used to be there too. I wondered how he felt out there. If he'd found peace in the other room which had so passionately won his heart or if he was wandering the empty, darkness. Some days I wondered if he had been born into the wrong room all those years ago. That maybe this was his path all along. That maybe the door being slammed in that final, furious way was always going to happen. I would never in my wildest dreams touch the handle, but the way he'd torn the door open was a vision that never left my mind. However, once and again I'd take out my memories that were shaped like perfect, little marbles. I'd admire them and let the love I'd felt in those moments flow through my body. So strange that somebody who you always considered to be yours in a way actually never belonged to you in the first place. What took a long time to understand was, that I never belonged to him either. Despite the memory marbles we'd made we didn't owe each other anything. Just because the marbles were created in this very room didn't mean it had had to work out or that these walls meant the same to us. The dusty chair in the corner became the pillar of blanket forts or a spooky dragon for people whose littleness and wonder can teach others so much. Life went on as the big clock on the wall dictated. Eventually the hope of the chair to making its way back to the table faded. New hopes and dreams filled the room except that little gloomy corner. But life was bouncing off the walls now and one day with a little one on my lap and sunlight beaming through the windows, my little one said: "My feet aren't cold anymore." and somebody knocked carefully on the door.