Poem: Doors
A woman in her almost-thirties. What’s coming next? A promotion, a baby or a new stamp on the passport? Maybe one of them, maybe none, maybe all? I am ready to open whichever door is the next one, and glad to open more than one at the same time, too. There is no guidebook for living.
Doors
I open one of them and see it—
The roar of my twenties
under the yellow lights
of a random
European city at night.
Untamed, creator,
lonely but wide awake.
Crossing another,
the Christmas photo cards,
gingerbread candy houses
and the poem I read
on our wedding night.
Steadiness, solace,
cinematic tenderness.
Always the white noise to decide.
But I refuse to get locked
between doorways
of what could have been,
or to be suffocated
by all the exit signs.
I want to open them all—
The ones holding
a home-shaped key hanger,
and the ones with the room
and emergency numbers on it.
All the potential other sides
shall not scare me anymore.
For even the ones that shut—
open.
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The door neither opens nor closes.
It abides, motionless, a mirage of the boundary.
For upon the threshold, in any stance,
you remain both within and without,
the one who crosses and the one who lingers,
the dweller of the center where borders dissolve.
The door never truly opens nor closes;
it only dreams of such gestures.
For the threshold divides nothing:
where you imagine entering, you already are,
and where you fear departing, you still remain.
You are the inside breathing through the outside,
and the outside keeping vigil within the inside,
a single heartbeat dwelling in two silences.
Carlos Serna II
This is so such a lovely and hopeful poem.