Passing Through

“There are consequences for life.”

This my mom says over the phone as I sit outside my house on Friday afternoon. It’s a tense conversation because we are trying to work together to map out the direction of a fast-approaching future—am I coming home for the summer, where am I working, who am I—but I’m not willing to commit to anything yet. Everything holds possibility and that responsibility is stressing me out. I can feel it like Velcro: the hard, scratchy side warm in my palm, waiting for contact with its softer counterpart. Unattached Velcro is desire, materialized. Desire, wrapped up in waiting—a product of the time line we are born into.  I am quiet until I sigh, saying,
“I know, mom.”

            “No, I don’t think you do.” She says.

Today Tate built a fort in our living room. We called the boys over and cacooned ourselves inside it while Trifon read us short stories found on Google.  One story about a small town ghost, one about a certain Dr. Panini; mad scientist PHD. Google is an excellent holding room for second-rate literature. We made waffles and opened a bottle of wine and held a double feature on my computer. The movies watched: Wrist Cutters and Mr. Nobody. I recommend both.

Brad tells us of a dream he had once. In it he is a soldier, an officer of some rank. There are people testing dynamite, they use a door to keep the flame from reaching the pile of explosives. As Brad keeps watch over them, directing them in their duties, the people began to disappear. One after another they saunter off into dream-darkness. Brad is very nervous—there is no longer anyone to keep the flame from reaching the dynamite.
“Fine!” He yells,
“We’re all going to die!”
Exhausted, anxious, he wakes up in his own bed, drenched with the need to pee. Terror blocks in the emotions of the dream as Brad faces the decision. If he runs to through his door to the bathroom, he risks breaking what his mind is telling him is the only thing keeping his house from violently exploding. Or, if he chooses to not move, Brad wets the bed. We all laugh when he says he chooses to risk the explosion. No thing is worse than a wet bed.

I am caught off guard. I feel unbelievably connected to the moment of choice roiled in fear and confusion that Brad described. It’s a threshold moment that lately I feel often. It’s where we pause to size up the outside world against our own inscape, deem our self insufficient against the odds and our end imminent, yet move on anyways.

The threshold moment can last forever.

There are consequences here, and deep fears that predate self-awareness. Nightly I pass through these thresholds, doorways of final existences and of making peace with life and the end of it. But then I choose to finally sleep or accept death and am through the door completely. Waking up I find myself the same, or at least still whole—physically unharmed. Deep breathing and a filtering sunrise distills my terror. I have returned to the morning, and downstairs my housemates are making waffles for breakfast.