Entrances and Exits

by Richard Hartwell

           

Entrances and exits: doors opened or closed; or ones slammed behind you. It is of these that much, perhaps most, of life is made. It is entrances and exits upon which attention is riveted. All that falls between is merely dross of daily living, splinters of shattered doors.

How many times can you open a door, enter into a conversation, before it sticks in your mind that demons lurking behind it in the shadows are waiting just for you? I am revolving in my life. Spinning circles. Creating eddies; eddies flushing away the center of my being. I am tired of wasted days, missed moments. I feel expendable, except to a very few. It’s not so much a poor self-image as it is being so thick skulled that I don’t realize the door was stuck shut for a reason.

I seem hung up on this theme of entrances and exits. Many of these seem to be the moments by which I live. Not much in between seems to be of any use. I try, but my trying seems to try the nerves of those surrounding me. I wish I could find the master key.

The clock passes time much more smoothly than I. I am all fits and starts, progression by catastrophe rather than incremental advancement. The passage of time is not uniform, but is governed by the surrounding residue by which we judge how long it’s been since the pursued broke camp ahead of us.

What do you want from me when we have nothing left to say? It’s as if the conversation must be poked alive just to insure that neither of us is a quitter. Somehow I am at the point of no longer caring about labels used by others towards or about me. Many labels are true, but only momentarily. If moments are truly fluid, then labels are no longer valid immediately after applied. Each tick of the clock produces a new label that is then obscured by the next label, each piling up over one another during the course of a lifetime. I still cannot see the horizon or, yet, the exit.