PORTAL
Category: Poems

PORTAL

The girl named Key approached the front door in the foyer. The portal to the outside world seemed to be undeniably open. Outside, lamplights hovered over the sidewalks of her suburban neighborhood. She used to think those lights were so pretty, like lanterns in autumn and guiding stars. Now, the amber shadows were broken glass bottles. They were artifacts from dogged nights. And then they ended, and all that is left is sunlight, such vacant and hollow sunlight, and the hollow brokenness of the shells of bottles on the kitchen tiles.

There were no obstacles preventing her from exiting her home. Her teeth gnash and grinded on themselves, fitting together like fingers intertwined. Like car keys in ignitions. The molars throbbed white, stringent acrostic poems. Her eyes felt sunken, and they itched from lack of sleep. Her gums were pink.

Pink. Pink.

The word sounds obscured after you look at it from a different way. She tried to make her own language once.

(You never liked that, yeah—the freedom of youth. I could never do that. Manipulate words to convey a specific meaning, like Key does. There always was a certain vagueness, and grinding, chomping pattern to the lies I told you, about the things that I do when I’m all alone and the lights in our little house are flicking, clicking off and flying like black arrows in the walls. 

And I remember thinking, as a key unlocks a locked door, was it really freedom that came with being alive, or was it a privilege?)

 The only word she translated in it was “pink.” It was the only concept that seemed to matter when she was a child. The color makes her want to scream and break now. Colors often do.

Key, for the second time, approached the front door, which was ajar, and in the very front of the house she took residency in, which had, in the very front, a big, brown door that was open with a small girl inside of it. 

The bushes finely cut into shapes of animals, looked like a zoo, a circus, and all the animals danced on her lawn, bellowing “Come out, Key, and come dance with me!” All the forest behind the cul-de-sac swayed and bobbed their leaves and blew and blew until the clouds spelled, “Key.” The gate protecting the winding road to her house swung open and closed, open and closed it swung and creaked her name, “Key.” The streets erupted and shattered, through black lightning strikes in the ground. Through the chasms in the cul-de-sac, the whole neighborhood screamed, “KEY.”

In opposition to the back door, the front door was conveniently open. The back door was closed, shut, and unlocked. All the doors seemed to be that way. All the doors, except, of course, the front one. At one point in its existence, the door remained open. The back door of the house was in no way locked; however, it may have seemed that way, since it was, in fact, fully closed. If anyone specifically had tried to open the door and walk inside, it would be simple to do so. Four simple steps—walk, turn the knob, open, and walk again. The front door, however, only required one step to pass through it. Key found that one single step to be significantly harder this time around. The front door was not a particularly special or beautiful door—in fact, it was quite the opposite. If you stood in the exact position Key stood, in the foyer of her house, clenching her fists like chewing mouths devouring dust, you would probably say that nothing truly stood out to you about it. Except for the fact that it was open. The door was brown, like all the doors in the house, except the refrigerator door. The refrigerator was tinted mint green.

(I know that in some way you are responsible for the color. And I always knew the color was a vessel for ghosts to live in. Mint smelled ominous and sour. Like eggs.)

Key, however, smelled like Earth---pure, vacuous Earth. Her house reeked of screens and pulsing electric signals. Like tests, and subject matters. It smelled like mathematics. It didn’t smell like a home—it was a lab. The house appeared to have been smelled by many others before her, it was older than most in the neighborhood. Somehow, all the houses looked the same. All with brown doors. Each with brown walls, each with bleeding tile floors, and perfect punching black out plaster walls. Everything in Key’s house glowed in a black out. The back door remained unlocked. The back door was unlocked.

No one really cares about that though.

Key attempted to walk through the front door of the house with as much fervency and ardor as if it were a slick, red apple representing original sin. Her shoes looked like capsules, or pills. With a large enough esophagus, swallowing them would be simple. Key is a human, though, and not a vacuum. She had on little white tennis shoes. They were not brown. They were white. The refrigerator door, her shoes, and her black hair, and her teeth, and her pink, pink gums

Her bedroom door was ajar too—So much so that you could see nearly everything inside from standing under the foyer. It was directly above the stairs, another portal. I think you would love it. It had pretty little things lying around. Her room had a gorgeous red carpet and gold and jewelry and blue and yellow and orange and nothing in it was brown. Pictures and images of other girls, of sweet posters, dogs and fruits and drama and thick femininity. Nothing there was out of its place. I think a girl should have a lot of pretty things in her room. You told me that, once, when you bought me that expensive suitcase. You spend a lot of money on things other than suitcases.

Remember when you woke up early that morning? It was dawn and I was already awake. You went down the stairs to make yourself an omelet. I followed behind you, but you didn’t notice. The house was dark, and cold, and blue like it always was back then—perpetually winter. I stood in the doorway while you greased the pan, and you got out the muted white egg carton and took out two brown eggs. And then you took them and broke them. Crushed them in your hands and made the yolk slime smear down through your fingers. And all the suns in space exploded with that. All the flowers died, all the fingers broke and all the green eyes bled black.

You heard me gasp in the doorway. I saw your silhouette against the kitchen window above the stove and you looked like a big, black gravestone. You turned back to me and your face was stone too. Your eyes were closed. It was still dark out, but I knew your eyes were closed. I shut the door behind me. I wanted to hear your footsteps. All I heard as I leaned against the door was the sound of the disposal grinding eggshells. I stared at my painted pink toenails.

Do you remember that?

I hope you do. It’s one of my fondest memories of you. I love that about you—how you can break the world with just one hand.

You are a prisoner in my mind, now.

You were always a vacancy, mother.