Doorway

All I see is darkness.

I hear voices echoing all around, meshed with each other, not a single clear word. I close my eyes and think about how this is what the first few moments after waking up are like for me lately, day after day. The sun hits my face because I forgot to pull the blinds down when I fell asleep the previous night. I wake up and stare at the ceiling, vision clouded with a strange darkness despite the golden light streaming into the room. And the voices. I open my eyes and stare back into the doorway— familiar darkness. The voices disentangle themselves from each other. Phrases that feel like uneven glass edges dragging along my skin, become louder and clearer. You are not enough. You never will be. Everyone hates you. The pretence of perfection is not sufficient. Harshness echoes around me and I wonder why my mind has become the universe’s greatest weapon against me.

I see a woman— someone from my past, someone I once loved and was loved by. She carries immense rage against me now and I see it in her eyes as she emerges from the darkness of the doorway. I step closer to the threshold, closer to her. She has a knife in her hand and she drags it along my arm; I let her. I once did this to her too, with my words. The cuts are now equal I suppose. She fades away and the gash on my arms stays. Ruby red droplets fall to the marble floor. I look up and the smoky darkness of the doorway tempts me.

Familiarity materialises from the haze once again. I find honey-brown eyes looking into mine and my chest rises and falls faster with the thought of— it. has. been. so. long. It has been so long since I had the privilege of looking into those eyes. It has been so long since I pushed this man out of my life for one unforgivable mistake. I watch him graze his fingers along the gash on my arm and I wonder if that mistake really was unforgivable. But then he presses down on the wound, hard. I jerk and bleed faster. My head is spinning and my vision is blurry, as I look up at the man who once claimed to love me, who I once gave my soul and my body (but not my heart). Here he stands, betraying me once more, as he did in the autumn a couple of years ago. He ripped shreds out of my heart then, because I had refused to give it to him willingly and now, here he stands, attempting to scratch at it again with familiar, loving violence. His hands are red and I find myself smiling, thinking— it is my blood that he wants and not someone else’s. Come back, he says. We had played the painful, rhythmic dance of the waves and the shore for so long before, but the absence of it now is a different pain altogether. But I choose myself, for only a second time in the twenty years of my life. I give up familiarity— I force myself to look into his eyes one last time and tell him that it will be the last time. Forgive me and forgive yourself and let go of whatever semblance of us is left. He stumbles back and now his eyes have a teary sheen like mine do. He fades out of my vision like he did once, long ago, and I start to see black spots in my vision.

Blood is dripping faster down my arm, it sticks to my clothes and stains them horribly. I laugh deliriously— my mother would be so angry. The doorway is swirling with the dark smoke now. I think of the night when I was sitting out in a field at midnight, in the middle of a storm, with my first lover. I think of how the clouds ominously swirled overhead then and how he pulled me closer when the thunder got louder. I think about how new and yet, recognisable the feeling of love was when he laid his head down on my chest and I looked up to stare at the dark sky. I stare at the doorway now and I think about the multiple lives I’ve lived already.

I let myself be swallowed by the darkness (it wouldn’t be the first time).