03 - The Door You Don't Open
The Carrying · Episode 03
The Carrying · Episode 03
The Door You Don't Open
Some rooms stay closed so long that we learn how to walk around them.
From Episode Three
Imagine a house with eleven rooms.
Ten of them you move through without thinking.
One of them you stopped entering a long time ago.
Eventually, you learn how to live around a closed door.
Transcript
Read the transcript
I want to tell you about somebody. It doesn't matter who.
She lives in a good house. She worked for it and it's hers, and she'll tell you that if it comes up, because she's proud of it and she should be. Eleven rooms. She uses ten.
The eleventh one is upstairs, at the end of the hall, past the linen closet, on the left. The door stays shut. Not locked. She's never locked it—it just closes on its own if you don't hold it, and nobody's held it in a long time.
And everybody who's ever lived in that house knows not to go in there. Nobody ever said it out loud. Nobody ever sat anybody down about it. It's just understood, the way a house understand things.
There's a rug in front of it that's cleaner than the rest of the hall.
Every few months she ends up standing outside it. Usually late. Usually after everybody's gone to bed and the rest of the lights are off.
And she'll stand there with her hand up near the knob—not on it, near it—for a minute or two. And then she goes to bed.
And if you asked her about that room, she'd tell you it's just storage. Which is true. There is storage in it.
There's also somebody in there who isn't alive anymore.
There's a version of her life that was supposed to happen and didn't, and she can still see it clear enough to describe the kitchen.
And there's one thing she did a long time ago that she's never said out loud to anybody. Including the people who would love her anyway. Which she knows. Which somehow makes it worse.
Now here's the thing. That room costs her nothing. She doesn't go in it. She doesn't clean it. She doesn't think about it most days. Keeping a door shut is about the least effortful thing a person can do.
Except she takes the back stairs down to the kitchen now. She stopped putting guests in the room next to it. Now about six years ago she moved her reading chair down to the living room and told everybody the light was better.
Nine years. Not one decision ever made. And the whole top floor of a house she paid for has gone quiet.
And I'm not talking about houses.
I want to be careful here, because there are real reasons that door is shut.
Some of us closed it because there were people who needed us functional the next morning.
Some of us closed it because the timing was never right, and then it was years, and there's no natural way to bring something up after years.
And some of us closed it because the one person who could have opened it with us is the person who isn't here.
Those aren't excuses. Those are load-bearing.
So I'm not going to stand out in this hallway and tell you to go in. I've got a door too. Mine's been shut a long time.
I never talked about my ex-wife. Not to my family. Not to my friends. Not badly. Not well. Not at all.
And I didn't even know I was doing it until somebody in a small office pointed out that I'd been talking for a year about a marriage without ever once saying anything about the person who was in it with me.
I didn't have an answer for that. I just remember it got very quiet in there.
And we don't open it, because we don't know what it would cost. We don't mention it, because the moment for mentioning it passed a long time ago and there's no road back to it.
We don't tell the people who love us, because then they'd have to carry it too—and we've spent a lot making sure nobody has to carry anything of ours.
So we just take the long way. And we take it enough times that we forget there was ever a short one.
So which way did you walk today?
There's a subject you steer around. There's a name you don't say. There's a question people stopped asking you a while back, because you got good at making sure it never came up.
Take a moment and notice the shape of it. Take a moment and notice which rooms you've stopped going into, because they're too close to it. Take a moment and don't open anything.
Nobody's going in there tonight. Not you. Not me. Get comfortable. Let it get quiet.
Breathe in.
And let it go.
Now put yourself in the hallway.
Rest of the house is dark. Everything's quiet.
And the door's there. Same as it's been.
You're not going in. That isn't what this is.
Just stand near it a minute.
Notice what your body does when you get close.
You didn't close that door because you were weak.
You closed it because at the time you had people depending on you and nowhere to fall apart.
But nobody ever came back and told you the emergency was over.
So you can stop standing guard.
The door can stay shut. You can just sit down.
Take a breath.
Open your eyes when you're ready.
Nothing in that room is chasing you.
It's only waiting.
If something stayed with you
Which room do you walk past?
Stay a little longer
The questions, and the part that’s yours.
Which way did you walk today?
What have you learned to walk around?
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