“Have you opened it?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
She nodded slowly. Then she asked if I had somewhere else I could stay for a while. I said I could stay with my brother. She said that sounded like a good idea and helped me pack a bag without either of us saying what we both understood: that I was leaving because the alternative was staying in the apartment with that door, and that neither of us could articulate a version of opening it that ended well.
I stayed with my brother for five nights. On the sixth day I went back to the apartment because I needed clothes and because I had a deadline and because I had decided, in the rational daylight of my brother’s spare room, that I was an adult who worked in graphic design and not a character in a story and that a door, however inexplicable, was a door.
The hallway was empty. No door. The wall between the bathroom and bedroom was smooth and unmarked and exactly as it had always been. I pressed my palm against it in the spot where the door had been. Cool, solid plaster. Nothing.
I stood there for a while and then I unpacked my bag and made coffee and sat at my desk and worked, and by evening I had almost managed to feel normal.
That night, for the first time in twenty years, I had the dream without the door.
The hallway was there. The pale yellow walls, the sourceless light, the bare boards. But the end of the hallway was just a wall. Plain, unmarked, a dead end.
I stood and looked at it and felt, instead of the usual dread, something worse.
I felt loss.
I have been trying to understand that for three weeks now, and I keep arriving at the same place. Twenty years of the same dream, twenty years of the same door, twenty years of knowing I must not open it — and when it came into the real world and then disappeared, what I felt in its absence was not relief.
It was grief.
As though something had been waiting for me to be ready, and I had not been ready, and now it was gone.
I have not had the dream since. The hallway is gone too. I sleep differently now — flat and dark and dreamless, the way people sleep when nothing is looking for them. It should feel like rest.
It does not feel like rest.
Last Thursday I was walking to the shop at the end of my road, a route I have taken a thousand times. I turned the corner onto the main street and stopped.
A door. In the wall of the building on the corner — a plain door, dark wood, brass handle, thin line of darkness at the frame. In a wall that I know, from a thousand walks past it, has no door. An external wall. Solid brick behind it, I would have said, all the way through.
I stood on the pavement in the thin winter sun and looked at it, and people walked past me and around me and not one of them looked twice.
I did not go toward it. I turned around and walked home a different way and I have not been back to that corner since.
But here is the thing. Here is what I have been sitting with, alone, since Thursday evening.
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