​The Door

She sits at a windowside table at dusk, the interior lights only just brighter than evening.

The menu in her hands floats inches above the table. Her eyes drift across the road, tamed and led by old, lingering thoughts of him and of the split and muted memory of a man who took himself away while she was still a child.

She loved and hated her memories of Dad. They would sweep in on her in small, unpredictable ebbs throughout a year.

He had been perfect. Loving. Present. Anticipating her moods with nudges and hugs, songs and jokes. (And it all must have been fake, she sometimes thought, because no one is that man today so how could he have been then?)

But she didn’t feel the anger of someone deceived. She’d long stopped treating childhood memories as lies and instead came to see them as brilliant apparitions of what life looks like in primary colors.

Yes, what he did was weak and cowardly and cruel. But at twenty-seven she understood that such a deliberate self-erasure, a tearing apart of a book half-read, required a rage she hoped never to understand.

He tore the roof and walls off her childhood only weeks before she turned eight, leaving her suspended between God, whom she could choose to believe, and the nothingness she prayed would leave her alone.

It became the long, exhausting grief of growing up and out of the small mental space where her father lived. Of being delivered into the wider spectrum of her own adulthood. The door to that room would never open again, and she felt both the ache and the quiet relief that came with knowing it.

She ordered hot soup and duck. She wouldn’t remember smiling at the waiter or his subtle humor. She would call her mother on the walk home. She would say goodnight. She would say I love you. She had lived this day many times and held few complaints against it, on this side of her heart’s door.