My Door is Shut
2
I grow tired of the media. Not the media, as it has been presented to us by these coalitions of ideology, or the media, as it has been commercialized by those who seek to commodify a set of common tropes, but the media, as it has been made to permeate a supposed desire for human connection. Turn on the TV. Open a book. So often, the stories we are told, the novels we read, the songs we hear, idealize some abstract notion of love.
Don’t twist my words, dear Journal, or whoever I am trying to reach with my writing. I am no stranger to the concept of love. I loved, once. She walked past my window each morning, smiling. Something must have pleased her about the world for her to have so willingly entered into it. Some days she would wear a backpack and a suit; others she would let the folds of her sundress obscure the way her feet seemed to always know where to step. But every day, through the burning sun or the drowning rain, she walked past my window. Perhaps she had been placed there for me.
A temptation or a gift?
I, in my finite strength, fell victim to the myth of the media. There is this idea of the strength of love, the ability for it to overcome, the potency of its power to solve the problems of our simple lives. A man is casually cruel, fixed by the subtle softness of a woman he has only just met. Is it the idea of the woman’s kindness or the fear for what his life might look like without it that drives him? A woman is self-absorbed, self-conscious, made confident by the unconditional love of her husband. But perhaps she has displaced the condition so that now, should he no longer see her as beautifully confident, he will leave, and that self-consciousness now lives somewhere without sunlight.
Often, I wondered about stepping outside the boundary of my home and speaking to her. Would she look at me, the glint in her eye the reflection of sunlight? Would she smile and ask me my name, to which I would easily answer and take her arm in mine as I joined her for her walk? Or would she scowl, continue on her way with a wrinkled nose and upturned chin? Would she tell her friends of the man who lived off of 14th street in that old house, the one who had pockmarked skin and greasy hair? Would she, because of my exodus beyond, recalculate her morning walk so that she may never have to see me again?
Winter came, and she stopped walking past my door. I was younger then, less taken by the cold. Stupidly, I waited for the ice to melt, knowing that she would pass me by when the streets were cleared. Icicles dripped that December day as the Sun shone brightly on the world. She was nowhere to be seen. Surely, by spring, she would make herself known to me once more, a peacock flaring her feathers to find a mate.
So, there I waited, peaking through closed blinds and cracked curtains for this woman I was convinced meant something to me. Each time someone passed me by, my heart would leap and I with it, racing to the window to get a better look. It was only my mother or the mailman, sometimes an odd stranger, and never the woman to whom my heart belonged.
But with time comes reflection, and I have come to realize that the woman sought to become the object of my attention the same way an actress or an influencer does; she is beauty, she is grace, she is untouchable by those she seeks to woo. It was a trap of sorts, a siren song for the unwitting sailor, and I hadn’t known to put wax in my ears. I was lucky, then, to be tied by my skepticism to the vessel’s mast so that I could not leap into the ocean.
I looked over the edge of my craft once. I do not recommend it. Predators prowl those dark waters, circling, ever circling, waiting for fools to fall in. I am blessed, then, in that I am no fool. And now, floating somewhere in a distant sea that is leagues away from any rock, I walk easily across the deck of my ship and have no need for wax.
There is no languish of love, no promise of blood.
I am safe.