Fear Is An Open Door

I Hate Open Doors...

See, to me, a closed door is the most comforting sight in the whole wide world.

Now an opened door... that's another story.

The doctors just gave each other this look. I can tell this is what they've wanted me to talk about this whole time. Sorry, I tend to get ranty about stuff like this. My brain has set paths it likes to go on, and I kind of have to follow them. Not my fault.

Okay, where was I? Oh, right. Open doors. I used to hate open doors. Hate them with a capital H-A-T-E. There's just something so... unsettling about them. A passageway, left ajar by a careless hand, allowing access to anything and everything that lay on the other side. It's even worse when the lights are off in the room, and I can't see what's inside. Oh, but it can see me, though. Even if I'm all the way down the hall or even around the corner, I knows it's there, wanting to cross the threshold but unable to, completely aware of my presence on the other side. At least, when a door's closed, it can't see me. It's trapped behind a barrier it can't physically move on its own, silenced and banished to whatever realm it lives in when it's not trying to break into my world. Behind the door, it can't whisper to me, can't tempt me to close its only entrance, can't snatch me up and drag me through into some dark and horrid place. It can only get me if someone leaves the door open, like an invitation, you might say.

I bet I know what you're thinking. What am I talking about? What's "it"? Well... I don't really know. I've never been one hundred percent on what exactly the... let's call it the thing in the doorway... is.

I just know that open doors have always frightened me. Since I was in diapers. A doorway wasn't safe unless I was the one who opened the door. Only I could do it fast enough to trick the thing inside from seizing the opportunity to catch me between rooms. My record is less than two seconds to open, get in, and close, though I think five is probably the longest I have to get the door closed again. I learned over the years exactly how to trick it.

No one else ever seemed to care about this problem. Doors were always left open wherever I went - at school, at the mall, at home, everywhere. Gaping maws filled with something that apparently only I could see. I got mad at people who didn't close doors behind them, mad enough to throw tantrums and cause some pretty bad scenes out in public. I cried when my parents tucked me in and forgot to close my bedroom door at night, unable to sleep until they did. I even refused to go to the bathroom in my own home if someone left the door open after using it.

I'll admit, it wasn't easy living like this. I lost friends faster than I made them, I missed a lot of days at school, and I passed up many opportunities because something (or a lack thereof) stood in my way. I went to a lot of therapists as a child. Both they always asked me why I did this, why I couldn't be around open doors. To this day, I still can't give them a better answer than... because I just couldn't. I knew from the bottom of my heart that something lay in wait inside every doorway I saw, something evil and hungry and waiting for me to finally slip up and fall into its clutches.