Doors, Scars and Solitude

Doors, Scars and Solitude

(“For if you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” Matthew 6:14)

No one knew for certain how long the door had remained shut.
It was simply a cabin, a hut on the lake erected for solitude,
gazing at the moon, and weekends of contemplation. There were
no locks,
there was
no telephone;
just four walls, a roof without insulation,
and rooms barely decorated but designed to
silence the buzz-talk of city animation.

No one knew why the purpose had changed, or when. Some
suggested
the owner had grown cold in the winter and tired of the splinters
after walks in the woods. He still retreated there,
but without passion. Solitude was the agony of loneliness,
and contemplation gave way to unwritten schemes
to settle the scores of offenses listed in the home office.
He could not wait to be alone.

No one questioned the wrinkles that spread from eyelids outward
like hashmarks nearly reaching his ears. Those who know him best
see the lines of pain, nights of fright, days of pulling the covers over
his soul again. Those who met him on unprotected days
thought he might have been betrayed, but mostly felt the echo
of anger that resounded like nails on the brain, scars grabbing the wound
and never looking the same.

No one entered inside the unlocked door, nor knew how
the outside could be cold as frost and the inner panel a foundry
of fire. But behind the door, nearly unhinged by time,
the scars kept bleeding, the wounds kept seeping, and he
hid for fear of one more pointed instrument piercing his
once active love.

He held the doorknob tightly each time he entered his
former refuge of light. He vowed to let nothing go
out of his grasp again. He had tried washing his wounds
in the lake alone; self-baptism and a solo rite of purification.
He threw the names far into the water, along with their claims
of moral dispensations, hoping to bury each bruise beneath
opaque waves.

He was never the man he began to be, never again the man
who honestly wanted only the best, and always confessed
stumbling more often than observed. How could they, who
also served, not do the same when they had used his name
to typify so many ways to fail?

He never was the same man, though honesty, when it all
began,
tried to forgive with melted tears, but still, after years
of hope,
seeks solitude to escape his fears mixed with love. Such
a stew of a man

He still is startled by every
knock on the door.