The open door

(in response to Night Moths, a poem by Jackie Kay)

This immediately reminds me of a local charity called "Open Door", this charity looks after and tries to help street drinkers. The open door also takes me back to Ireland and a song in which there is a line, " the door is always open and the neighbours pay a call". Even in the city, where I was brought up, it was not unusual for a neighbour to call in, unannounced, but more often it would be a relative who was just passing. Mrs Brown's Boys, the television programme, gives a flavour of how things used to be in Dublin. Sadly, I think that a lot of "The Open Door" in that sense has gone.

This door, our door, the dark brown door that used to be bolted shut. Thick, so nothing could be heard, nothing could come in, nothing coming out. No whispers, no sounds, no light. No hope. You found a key, didn’t you? I forget where. It might have been in your pocket the whole time, waiting to be grabbed, and turned inside that lock. One turn, two turns, three, just to make sure. Top bolt, bottom bolt, then freedom. What kind of freedom, I ask? Freedom from what? You can’t think of yourself as captured if you have the key to the front door in your pocket the whole time, can you? Yet, I swear, this is how it felt.

The world is outside, it was there all along, but you were too scared to step out. And now you can see it, over your shoulder, the open door you left behind when you stepped outside. Is that the place in which you chose to barricade yourself all this time? That tiny portion of blackenss, framed, uninviting?

That’s how you know you’ll never go back; when you look back at the door you exited without thinking of it as home.

Home is what you carry in your heart.

Home is what makes you happy to be alive.

Home has no boundaries and no doors – open or shut. Just windows with clear glass.

Years ago I lived with very sociable friends who left their front door unlocked so that visitors could pop in whenever they wanted to. I liked this open door policy. If I didn't feel sociable I could just disappear upstairs to my bedroom.

I am concerned about hostility towards migrants since Brexit, although I appreciate that there need to be controls. I have friends in Germany who have befriended migrants in their home town and who participate in classes to help them learn the German language. I went with my friends to meet the refugees. We played cards and Scrabble in German. I love Scrabble but Scrabble in German was beyond me. The atmosphere was very convivial and and there was a lot of laughter. I was immensely touched..

The door is open.

Very wide open and made of light.

It is so tall and broad that I can barely see the frame of it.

The door itself is right off the hinges – laid flat in a tangle of grasses and daisies.

Trickling water tickles, tempting me into a strange country that I do not know. The door is wide open and I am afraid of it.

Dare I go? Sick and limping into an existence so strange?

If I get scared enough the door will close, I’ll be there on the outside, too scaredto knock. How could I turn down such endless horizons? The sirens are singing and the

sails are filling and there is no question really.

I must go. Regardless of success or failure.

Just to feel the wind in my hair once again. My Joseph and I used to leave the window open and the lights on so that all the exotic night-flying- beauties would come in and fly round the room, landing on the lampshade, or landing on the window outside – to be seen and not trapped. They were part of our night-time ritual, with flowing wine and black-fruit- kisses.

Entwined in honest company, those kisses were remarkable: fluttering and

intricate and full of meaning. Can a kiss be eloquent? But he was always eloquent.

And he told such beautiful lies. His drunken fantasies could catch us up in story…

He wondered aloud to me in earnest:

Do you think a moth can slip between dimensions of reality?

Has one ever made it as far as the moon?

And is that why they fly to the light?

Trying to fly to the moon.

I think we have had this prompt before, or was it the closed door. I remember writing about not having closed the door, having left it ajar. Today I feel anxious about my journey back to Belfast, back to the place of my childhood. I feel I have opened a door into the past, as well as to the future. Excitement has given way to trepidation about what I will encounter and what will happen to what I have left behind. Imagined catastrophes. Change. What kind of change? I fear the emotions I will feel when I’m away. Away. Am I going from or going to? Leaving or arriving? Going home or taking a break from home? Wondering where is home. Wondering if home is a place or a set of emotions, mostly unprocessed, both familiar in the density and weight, unfamiliar in the individual details. It is time to look at each one, cup an empty jar around them, be still and feel, contemplate, and take in the specificity of each one, and let them go. Moths, balloons, hopes and dreams, outdated fears, let them float and fly and rise to where they need to go, to be. Letting go. The open door. A breeze, a draught. Letting go, escaping; coming in, intruding, entering, coming back. Words, words, words. What shape will the words take? Will there be a cold stream chilling my spine, piercing me with its icy fingers? Will there be a tender kneading of warm hands, rejuvenating my muscular self? What words, what hands, what feelings, what experiences will enter through this open door? And what will leave, scuttling or escaping unseen, or what will stomp out, slamming, the door bouncing closed then ajar? Resting in an open position. Not unguarded. It can still be closed. But it doesn’t have to be. Not closed. Not locked and bolted. But open, welcoming? Perhaps. Open to what needs to pass, one way or the other. Threshold exposed. The line drawn in the sand; a low hurdle to jump. A stepping over, across, outside in or inside out. A going between, from one to the other. Movement. Nothing stays the same. Even in preservation is decay. I like decay. I like the process of change in decay. Watching the mould grow on the cheese in my fridge, different cheeses, different moulds, a rainbow of colours. Outside the door the rainbow reckons.