An Inside Job
She decided it was time to clean out her basement. The one with the dirt floor. The one down the dark stone stairway into her heart, well maybe her heart, but just possibly her soul or her mind or something she doesn’t have a name for. She’s never actually been down there before. It’s been locked for ages. Her ages. She has stood on tiptoe at the door and tried to peer through the reverse peephole. (She wondered at the time who the hell looks out that peephole.) To her surprise she finds the key to the door in her pocket. She doesn’t even remember having a pocket let alone a key. Anyway she’s worried about what she’ll find there. But she knows she has to look. She’s met people who don’t. It isn’t pretty. She doesn’t want to be like them. They’re either brittle angry husks or ghosts with no awareness of what they are missing.
She assumes the door opens into her inner most chamber. She’s wrong. First there’s a room where old worries hang on the walls in tangled macramé creations in various stages of completion. Some museum worthy and some a straggled mess. It’s dark. She occasionally loses her step as she trips over unseen obstacles on the floor. She always regains her balance but notices knife-quick, tiny pains that sometimes pierce her heart as she falters. She feels unaccountably brave.
There’s another door on the other side of the room. She goes through it. She raises her hands to her ears to block out the cacophony of every complaint and disappointment she’s ever uttered. It doesn’t make her feel cheated or sad, but stupid. Stupid for wasting so much time. For filling her life with words that weave a story she’s not interested in inhabiting.
There is of course another door. She enters and finds tables full of things she sees as her worst traits. Things her mother would identify as faults to be fixed, or short of that, camouflaged, like the bags under her eyes. Unexpectedly there are small classification cards pinned beneath each item. They detail in tiny print how each of these traits serve her well in every scenario from riding on a crowded city bus to surviving after waking up naked in the wilderness.
The next door leads to a room with bubbled glass, porthole style windows. She peers through several seeing herself the way a particular person or collective group of known or unknown others sees her. There’s a little brass plate etched with the name of whose eyes she is seeing herself through affixed with tiny brass brads at the bottom of each window. The room is endless and yet it feels small. She realizes it might be impossible to look through all the windows in her lifetime. She’s not sure if the view is affected by her own gaze. Or not.
She notices how clean everything is. No dust. No bugs. No vermin. She intuitively understands that opening that first door caused years of detritus and rot to be swept away. Perhaps it’s the faintest smell of a putrid residue in the air that has informed her nose, which in turn informed her brain of this fact.
When she opens the last door it becomes the first door. She feels simultaneously separate and apart from herself. And from the world. She didn’t die. She didn’t crumble. There was no Indiana Jones magic-bestowing artifact. There was no condemnation or exaltation. There was just her. She is amazed that this feels like enough. That this feels like everything.
Cinse Bonino
2023
