No words

I stopped writing this week. No words on my work-in-progress. No words in my every-morning-for-the-past-fifteen-years journal. Writing is how I make sense of the world, how I process my thoughts. But more and more the world makes no sense, and I am tired of processing my own thoughts. 

What if, I wondered, I just decided to quit?  

I spent a day cleaning. I spent another day flopped out on the porch swing, alternating between trying to read, crying, and sleeping. It was possible I was having something of a minor nervous breakdown. But then I got tired of that too and took the dog for a walk. It was swelteringly hot and I could feel the energy leaking out of me with every step. How do other people do this? 

But I already know the answer. You just do it. 

When I was a little girl, I used to have panic attacks. Nightmares. I'd wake in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back to sleep. Or rather, I was afraid to fall back to sleep. I was terrified of the dark.

Terrified of someone sneaking into my bedroom in the middle of the night. It wasn't a baseless fear. Even when I was eight years old, I knew that there are bad people in this world, and truly, many of them want to hurt us. To cope, I surrounded myself with dolls and stuffed animals, a particular order and arrangement, their plastic-y faces and hairy heads pressing against me as I fought to keep my eyes open. I always lost the battle. 

There's a road my dog sometimes leads me down when we go on our walks that I call the Chicken Road because it winds behind a house that has a chicken coop in the backyard. The dog likes to run up to the fence and the chickens lazily scatter. Then they scrabble back, not really afraid, the dog, tongue lolling, happily watching. While the animals play this game, I study the small wooden door that someone (the chicken owner person?) has glued onto the bottom of a nearby lamppost. It's exactly the kind of thing I would've loved when I was a little girl. 

Small things because I was small and wished I could be even smaller. One more plastic doll propped on a bed. But what a small door! Where could a door like that lead? To what other world? And off my little mind would go. The colorful, rollicking landscape. The happy and kind people who lived in that place. 

Something I learned when I was eight years old was that while I had no control over my own life, I had been given a gift to slip into other lives. Forget the dolls and stuffed animals. I could write. I didn't do it to understand the senselessness of the world or to process my own thoughts. No. Back then writing was escape. Survival. Magic. 

Power. 

It got me the hell out of where I came from and kept me (somewhat) sane along the way. It brought me to where I am now. Paused for the moment on a winding road with the dog and the scattering chickens. A door fixed to a lamppost, and what can I do... but open it? 

Hi I am Jody and I don't close doors

What I'm talking about are cabinet doors, drawers, the doors to the medicine cabinet, the dresser etc. What happens is I walk into a room, do things that require opening doors and then, don't close them. I've done this unconsciously for years, apparently? and had never even given it a second thought (except for the occasional crack on the head or banged knee) until the movie The Sixth Sense came out

and my husband started walking into rooms where I'd been sitting and would remark: What is this, The Sixth Sense?

(This is only funny if you have seen the movie, so I will quickly catch you up. A little boy is haunted by dead people. They're everywhere, is the famous line. And sometimes, when he's in the kitchen, the dead people will open every cabinet door and drawer, and then the mom will walk in and the kid's just sitting there, with his hands pressed into the table so hard he leaves marks and with an expression on his face that screams, I did not open any of these doors!)

The question that is never specifically answered in this movie is WHY dead people like to open doors and not close them. I can't explain why I seem to open doors and not close them either. I'm not dead, so let's get that one out of the way. Although, it's possible there are dead people living in my house. 

How I found this out was shortly before my husband and moved in, we met the seller and she mentioned casually that two people had died in the upstairs bedroom. This house had a lot of issues that we had known about when we bought it. For example, the dining room ceiling was painted orange and the front and back door had faucets in place of doorknobs, and giant eyes were decal-ed on one of the walls, which made me think of the cover of The Great Gatsby. Also, the house reeked of cigarette smoke and multiple cats' urine. 

My husband and I knew all of this when we bought it and we were sure we could fix it all up (spoiler: we did) but for a moment there, when the seller told me about the dead people, I admit I was a little concerned. But I rallied, and with the help of Google, I solved all of our house problems. 

Thank you Google!

But all the while, I kept, apparently, entering rooms and opening doors and not closing them, a practice that my husband had made peace with, because he rarely mentioned it. Until, this past year when my daughter and her boyfriend were living with us and one day he said something like, 

Do you know you always leave doors open?

And my daughter added, It makes him nervous. 

Which made me wonder if it was time to deal with this problem, and the first step in dealing with a problem is to admit you have a problem. 

The end.