Yet Untitled 045 - “Door, Opening”

The haptics of metaphorical doors

Door, Mussoorie, c.2008

Dearest Yet Untitler,

Today, I want to talk to you about Doors.

Used metaphorically, there’s a lot to a door. Ask Alice, who saw a verdant garden on the other side of a tiny door. Ask Aldous Huxley, ask Jim Morrison - both of whom lifted the image of a humble door from a mundane, movable part of a wall to portal between states of being.

I’ve been thinking about doors this past week. I’ve been experiencing doors opening - the metaphorical ones.

A lovely old-wood door, with brass knobs, well oiled, solid hinges can be a delight if you’re into collecting sense memories of haptics. The opening of a metaphorical door, I guess, makes it’s own kind of sound in the realms of our internal life. When I think of metaphorical doors opening, it’s usually a metaphor employed to communicate breaking through, ‘making it through’ to some place I couldn’t get to earlier.

In my experience, the opening of metaphorical doors doesn’t come so easy. But when it comes, as it did a few times this week, the metaphorical sound of the metaphotical door swinging on metaphorical hinges is fan-bloody-tastic in a very real way.

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The door between her and me

For me, marrying Vani was possible only because a very stubborn door opened, one that was jammed shut as my own doing. I was adamant that I would only marry on my own terms - if I could find my own partner.

But one day, perhaps succumbing to loneliness, I relented to accepting help. I agreed to meet someone my parents wanted me to meet. On the way to the meeting, I had decided that I’d be out of there in an hour tops; and I had rehearsed the stern talk I’d have with my parents about never doing this again.

It turned out to be Alice’s verdant garden on the other side of that door. Four months later, I was married to the very person I had so reluctantly agreed to meet. We have been married for twelve years. And I love her.

Vani and I, c. 2010

I’ve been thinking about how I managed to open that door and walk through. Perhaps it was this - I thought less about what the garden was, but stuck to the thought of wanting to walk in a garden, somehow knowing intuitively that a walk in a garden would do me good.

Thesis 1: I let the door know that I was ready to walk through it. For some reason, I was willing to trust the door despite it not showing me, fully, what lay on the other side.

Thesis 2: I trusted myself to be able to deal with whatever garden there was on the other side of the door, verdant or not.

Thesis 3: I trusted what I lay in plain sight in front of me on my trajectory towards the door: a beautiful human being who I knew nothing of except for the fact that we were both gazing roughly in the same direction towards the future.

There was so much we didn’t know. But the next door, we walked through together.

What the door to Vani taught

This makes sense now. I was prompted to write this edition riffing off a feeling of new movements - various doors swinging on their hinges, suddenly opening for after remaining closed for so long.

Thew now opening doors: the feeling that I’m telling them that I’m ready to walk through is daunting…

…but so had it been when I had walked through the door to Vani.

The feeling that I don’t know what lies on the other side of those doors is frightening…

…as it had been when Vani and I told each other and our respective families that we wanted to get married.

Vani and I have Ananya and Aahana because we walked through a door together.

They surprised us by emerging together, they surprise us every day. What surprises lie on the other side of these new doors?

L ro R: Aahana, Vasant, Ananya, Vani; Karjat, c. 2023

To these new doors:

Doors, my friends. You are special because you cannot speak. You teach me so much because you give away so little, and then suddenly you cease as I pass through, giving away everything.

Realizing that you cease to exist once you have opened, I look at you afresh. You are all friends now - the old doors and the doors yet to come.

I look forward to meeting many more of you.

Thanks for reading!

V