That is the Door I Will not Go Through

Through the doorway I can see the trunk of a tree two hands round. From its base, grass spreads, today dressed in dew. I’m not sure what’s beyond, except I can see green, and stems.

At the threshold, where the outside air meets the stillness inside, I have studied the tree’s bark. Like a skin long exposed to the elements, it is crusted, varied in colour, cracked. It seems inflexible, but it accepts the strongest gale.

The light from outside spills across the flagstones, a flood at first, then breaking up to droplets where an angle of the floor just happens to hook a ray.

It has been a long time since I went as far as the doorway, though I keep the door always in sight. It has never closed. Perhaps the hinges are false.

At night I can smell the moisture creeping round, coming in and circling this high room. There can be noises in the tree or in the grass – feet, calls, rustlings – but even when the moon is up I cannot see what makes them.

In the day sometimes I see birds, insects, but they are part of something else. I only know of them as they move across the doorway’s frame. Their chicks, larvae, prey and predators are unknown, although I guess at them.

On those days when the evening extends into the night, I can tell that there are people somewhere. A woodsmoke might drift into my throat. It stirs my feelings as a strong memory might. I want to cry, to embrace, but I have nothing for those things.

I am not responsible for the memorials. Each wall of this room is ranged with inscriptions on stone. They are of various sizes. They are comprehensive – name, date of birth and death, a list of virtues. I know some of these people. Or I have heard their names. To carve all that into the stone must have hurt the mason’s wrists. In the past I have reached up and touched the letters. My flesh folds into the cold, deep valleys of the names.

I’ve done enough of that.

The door that leads into this room, on the far side from that which stands open, is dark wood. It has a pediment, and columns either side of the frame, varnished and Doric. The carving of acanthus leaves in the wood, the cut oak leaves in the iron handle, were made, I have to remember. They are work. I have not tried the handle.

Other nights, when it’s wetter, or the wind is pushing against the walls like someone lost and turning, there’s metal in the smoke. Someone is burning a great pile of work. It stinks. I want the door to the outside closed.

In the morning, I wake with my eyes streaming and my throat scored out by a ruthless pen. The air outside the door seems clear, fresh with rain, but the burning of the night leaves its flavour through my body.

I used to go to the door and stare out into the space. When it was raining, I would enjoy how movement ran through everything, the air itself. On hot days stillness struck the grass, the palm-sized leaves that hung down over the trunk. Those were times when I believed I could read a map in the bark of the tree out there that would show me a wholeness that the doorway wholly encompassed.

My seat now is on the stone shelf that runs at a comfortable height under all the memorial stones. I have sat under each of them, but the space that now suits me best has only plastered wall as high as the cross-beam roof. I can face the door, see the trunk of the tree, but I am on the other side of the room. Weather outside is observation to me. I need not risk the backsplash of rain, or sweat in reflected sunlight.

The windows, widely space above the line of memorials, could tell me night and day. Or I could go entirely with the mood of my body, whose needs are met in the curtained alcove in the far wall. I don’t need to look through the door at all. But there is only so much distance I can keep between it and my gaze.

I walk, much of the day, my knee brushing the lip of the shelf I sit on, my hip catching on the iron handle of the entrance door, my shoulder touching the lower corner of some of the memorials – to halfway round the room. I cut the long sides short, walk the width of the space with only air on either side of me, only my feet touching the chamber itself.

My right side faces the inside, the names on the wall, the alcove, the closed door. My left faces the outside. On long warm evenings the light entering by the open door lays colour only as high as my chest. Keeping my head in shadow by walking this particular route avoids dazzle.

I know when I have spent too much of the day walking. I wake in a damp darkness, with the moon busy in every pane of the windows, and wetting the grass outside, though the tree remains in shadow. I do not want to slip off the warm blanket, feel the clatter of chill in my chest and jaw.

I stand, shiver my way towards the door. My calves are stiff, my shoulders rigid. I know what I will find – the wet print of one bare foot on the step. In the grass, cups of shadows lie where the walker crossed the lawn. Inside the room the prints grow fainter as the feet dried, until at the point where the moonlight meets shadow only the ghost of a shape appears.

I have heard nothing, seen no one, but this happens too often for me to believe it is a dream.

I look across into the darkest corners, but no figure appears. I never find prints that suggest that the other turned and went back out into the open air. In the mornings, even the grass is as it was, the blades sprung back and standing in their usual green.

I will wake to meet this visitor. Then I will know the door.