The sliding doors

The Sliding Doors

The Sliding Doors

I still remember standing before the sliding glass doors at my school entrance when I was thirteen. I watched them open and close repeatedly, my eyes flicking between the motion sensor and the camera above, waiting for someone to walk through. My thoughts felt strangely cold and detached.

I was watching.

Planning.

Waiting.

That year, something inside me fractured.

The rage consumed me. It was all-encompassing and wild, and even now, I cannot fully explain where it came from. Sometimes I think of that version of myself as madness incarnate. Other times, I wonder if it was simply pain with nowhere to go.

I remember the aching certainty that no one was listening.

If they won’t listen, I’ll make them listen.

I had tried and failed to speak, to be heard, to make someone understand. Then I erupted into chaos, screaming before my entire school. That wasn’t the first time I had surrendered to madness, but it was the most memorable.

The image of those doors—and the fury that filled me—still haunts me.

Back then, no amount of effort could contain the rage. It would rise and consume me until I became something made entirely of fire and fury. Even now, I can feel it deep in my belly. I fear that fire, but I also love it.

Within that rage, I sometimes feel the most beautiful and truthful version of myself. The flames that burn me also seem to create me anew, stripping away every pretense until nothing remains except the raw, undeniable self.

The fire burned through my memories and my mind, the way a phoenix burns before rising from its ashes.

I have been reborn from those ashes many times since.

I am still not sure whether my rage is insanity or sanity. Perhaps it is both: a dichotomy, a paradox, an emotional force that can destroy and illuminate in the same breath.

Over time, it has taught me and shaped me. It has shown me that even destructive energy can contain insight, and that chaos, if understood, can become a path toward understanding the self.

Now I try to give that rage other places to go.

I connect with people. I try to place myself in their shoes. I create.

Art.

Writing.

Music.

Imagination.

Each act of creation becomes an act of resistance—a way of redirecting the fire into something alive instead of destructive. I do everything I can to understand the rage, the fear, and the flames that still live inside me.

I know what that fire is capable of.

And that knowledge matters.

I don’t want to lose myself to it again, but I also refuse to pretend that the fire isn’t part of me. I am learning to carry it without letting it consume everything around me.

When I remember that day, I see a map etched not in ink but in emotion.

There are narrow corridors of rage, twisting and dark, where I once lost myself in fire. There are fields of memory, burned and barren, waiting for new growth. And there are high peaks of rebirth, where I climb from ash into air, learning the contours of myself again and again.

Each scar is a landmark.

Each outburst, a warning.

Each quiet recovery, another place on the map.

The sliding doors remain a waypoint—a reminder of how close I came to being lost and how far I have come.

On this map, madness is both a place of destruction and a terrain of survival. Rage is a river, sometimes flooding and sometimes frozen. Silence is a canyon where the echoes of the self gather. Rebirth is always the sunrise, tracing the horizon and pointing the way forward.

I am still walking that map.

I trace the paths that once threatened to swallow me. I remember the places where I broke and the places where I burned. But now, I carry the map consciously.

Each memory is a coordinate.

Each scar is a compass.

Each creation is a small act of rebellion against destruction.

And every rebirth is a new route through the intangible landscape of who I am.