Twisting Through the Doorways

A grand bronze-coloured staircase leads nowhere.

It is adorned in dim and sensual lights, the golden glimmer of the chandelier adding elegance and richness to the room. This is the biggest room in the unknown home. A house made of multi-sized doors leading to multi-dimensional rooms. Some exist in daylight, some exist sideways against child-like postered walls.

There is a bag of bent action figures in a corner. A closet elsewhere holds canned goods and dusty cleaning supplies. Sometimes the house is twisting. Strobe lights directing furniture in odd directions, threatening to crush me in the spiral effect. A dance party gone horribly wrong.

We are playing hide and seek. It is unknown as to who is hiding and who is seeking. I am always searching yet trying to remain hidden. Something is always after me. I am always trying to find something. It is an endless game of find and be lost, while doors creak until a cacophony of slammed doors at the last moment signals the time to be quiet.

Most times there is no sound. No music.

Everything is traveling in shadows through a house with no windows.

An artificial light shines from a doorway. It makes me believe there is daylight. That there is an exit to this house of constantly-twisting madness. Yet only melancholy seeps in through the light. There is no warmth except through the floorboards of a grand staircase that leads nowhere. Not up, nor down.

I do not try to reach the top, the first step beyond my ability. Each attempt is restructured, and the first step expands more than I can manage. The banister is always too far from my reach, as if my arm has shrunk and the banister has pulled back, purposely avoiding my touch.

I am both traveling through cut-out puzzle-shaped doors made of wood that’s always the wrong color, and stranded in the grand room that has no entrance or exit. I am both an action figure in an over-stuffed toy bag, and the melancholy that tries to contain myself in the dusty closet. Ready or not, here I come.

The house restructures itself without my control yet also because of my decisions. I blip through rooms like a glitch in the matrix yet never see my limbs in front of me. Everything is a silent contradiction that bursts in color schemes.

I avoid the bedroom that stretches the open doorway too far from my bed. A room painted in darkness, a doorway too brightly blank, a metal rod stashed under my mattress just in case. I pray the doorway doesn’t get filled with the shadows that are seeking when I am hiding. My comforter too thin, my hope the only forcefield I pretend that can cover me.

If only I could feel my heart beating to know I am breathing. But there is no sound, only movement that feels like gliding on the sharp edge of a knife. Each movement slices through like a high-pitched scream that shivers through my cerebrum. If only I could feel more than melancholy and fear and doors slamming shut upside down.

Every exit just leads to another room that shifts and spins around this house of uncertainty and familiarity. Every room is just box. Every box is just leftover forgotten toys. The floor is just pretend lava. The lights are just flashlights under patchy blankets. The metal rod is just protection. And I am just a child eyes searching. Everything in this house is just a mousetrap with no incentive.

And I, I am both cat and mouse.