Hi! 

How’s your weekend? 

So far, mine has taught me that there is no truer terror than looking up from a customer’s coffee order and seeing an ex-boyfriend walking down the sidewalk with his entire family. 

You could say that this is about that. But really, it’s about sitting in the sun with a bowl of cherries, staring at the ivy crawling over my neighbor’s door, and realizing that we all have forgotten doors. Portals into worlds we once knew, but have, for one reason or another, long since relinquished access to. These are some of mine. 

THE BODY REMEMBERS

My neighbor’s have a balcony that they never use. When they were remodeling, it was going to be too complicated to make it safe enough to stand on, so they didn’t. And not only that, but they plastered over the door leading onto it so that no one could ever walk through it again. But only from the inside. From the outside, it appears to be a normal door to a usable balcony. You would never know that a headboard is leaning up against what used to be the other side of the door, covering something that they don’t talk about anymore.

I know, because they showed me. And at first, every time I looked out of my window and saw that door, it felt wrong. Why would they do that? But over the years, ivy crawled up from the earth and wrapped its arms around that thrown away frame. Looking at it now, you can barely see what lies beneath that lush embrace. You might never know that anything was ever there. But the home does. And I do. 

I think that our bodies are like that. Because when I looked out at those invasive veins today, I thought of all of the ivy that is crawling through my mind, threatening to overtake things that I don’t have use for anymore. 

PRUNING

In psychology, they call it pruning. It’s the process of severing the synapses in our brains that we don’t need anymore in order to make space for new ones. We can’t hold onto everything, not forever.

In my high school psych class, they told us that this meant we would eventually forget those random biology facts we memorized for Tuesday’s test. They didn’t tell us that it also meant we would eventually lose access to what it felt like to sit in that biology class at fifteen. Or what we were wearing on the day that we met the first boy we ever thought that we might have loved. If the sun was out, or not. If it was a good day otherwise, or not. They didn’t tell us that it meant forgetting what our locker combination was or the sound of our favorite coach’s voice, yelling at us to run faster. They didn’t tell us that one day, we would never need these things again. I wasn’t ready to never need them again. None of us were. 

But that’s another story. 

UNDER THE IVY

This one is about pruning, about how I was only writing about the ivy-covered door outside of my window, yet how it made me think about all of the doors inside of me that I will never walk through again. The ones that have been plastered over and forgotten about because it would be too much trouble to make them feel safe again. It’s easier to just walk away, isn’t it? To just let time cover it all up? Why risk complications when you could just have a clean break?

Thats’s been my motto for a long time now, another one left over from adolescence that I am trying all of the time to undo. My first instinct is to sever connection. When I broke up with my last boyfriend and he asked if we would still be friends, I told him that that was up to him, since I was the one to end it. Yet when those texts came rolling in weeks and months later, asking if he left a sweatshirt at my place or telling me that he finally got around to reading that book that I told him he would love, I was cold. Friendly, but detached. Determined not to get close enough to where we might actually become friends. 

TO SAY YOU LIT THE FIRE

Why? Why not stay friends with the guy that I liked, but just didn’t love? Because like that balcony, it wasn’t worth it. It felt unsteady beneath my feet and, from a practical standpoint, one that I almost never take, it just made more sense to walk away, to board up the door and throw away the keys, locking myself out of another world. I don’t regret that. But I do sometimes think about all of the people that I used to know and all of the times that we have run into each other and said those fateful words of let’s get together soon and catch up, only to never quite bring myself to be able to pick up the phone. So ivy grows. And I water it. 

I was at work today and I looked outside and saw the first boy who ever held my heart in his hands. He was, as fate would have it, perhaps invariably, also the first one to drop it. And so, like a glass ornament hanging onto a branch far too weak, it slid off and shattered on the floor. For months I walked all over it, still thinking that it was my fault for bleeding when someone cut me. I believed that for a long time. I became obsessed with protecting myself, with burning bridges just to say that I lit the fire. It kept me from saying yes when he wanted to be friends again. Years passed. Ivy grew. 

ABANDONED DOORS

But when I saw him, my body remembered things my mind had long since pruned away. I didn’t know why my hands were shaking, just that they were. I was just trying to write down a coffee order, but my a’s and e’s kept falling off the page. I had fallen out of the world for a moment. And when I found myself back inside of it, I realized why we don’t use those doors anymore. Why we don’t cut through all of that ivy and try to step back into spaces that were once so beautiful, even if we now know how dangerous they are. How the floor of that balcony could give out at any moment and send us spiraling all over again. Who are we to say that we would survive it a second time? 

So they remain boarded up. People we used to know but don’t call anymore. Places we used to love but don’t ever go anymore. Friends, lovers, cities, schools. I’m only twenty-one but ivy is already crawling all over me like a second skin. 

I’m only just now coming to understand that sometimes that hurts just as bad. That maybe not all doors need to be plastered over the second we walk out of them. Because, if I’m being honest, I find myself wondering all the time about where they might have led. Even if I know it was right to burn the bridge, even if I know that nostalgia lies and the mind extrapolates, I still wonder. 

And, because it’s Sunday, here is a great article by none other than Maria Popova about why we need friendship, even when it’s hard. Always a brilliant read.

Love, m.

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