The Recluse

I sit in the closet with the skeletons. It’s dark here. Grayscale. A single candle lights the room—a flame that I’ve been trying to snuff out for years, but it keeps coming back, like a trick candle on a birthday cake, its only purpose to remind me that I’ve spent another year smothering my dreams. Each time I blow it out, it takes longer and longer to return.

The flame has a voice. A small one. Childlike.

“Why are we still here?” she whispers, “Why won’t you open the door?”

I sigh, “Because I am afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid that opening that door will lead me away from the people I love.”

“…Where are the people that you love?”

I turn toward the voice, eyes working hard to adjust to the light of the flame. I gesture to the empty space, “They’re here. Or… out there, I guess. When I am awake. Not on the other side of the door, just… on the outside of my skull.”

“All I see are skeletons.”

I glance around in the dim candlelight—at all the past versions of me that died with one hand on the door. There are no signs of the people I love here. No sign of rescue. Just me and the spark. The voice speaks again.

“If they really loved you, they would be sitting in the darkness with you, or they would pull you out.”

Tears spring to my eyes.

“But I am here,” she whispers, “because I love you. Open the door. Let us free. See what is on the other side.”

“I can’t.” I whisper, voice shaking.

“You can. We can.”

A sigh shakes loose from me as I stand, walking to the door—to the last iteration of me that tried to break free. I reach out with trembling fingers and pry the brittle, bony grip away from the knob. Phalanges crumble to dust. Perhaps one day the dust will become me again.

I bend down and peer through the keyhole. Blinding light whites out my vision, but after a moment things come into focus.

The world outside blooms in Technicolor. The sky is the most brilliant shade of blue. And the grass… it is not that the grass appears greener on the other side of the door, it is that there is no grass in here at all. No growth. No life. No light except my own flickering flame—the pilot light of my psyche.

I can hear laughter. Children run through the grass. A woman walks with them, holding the hand of a man my soul recognizes but whose face I cannot see. She turns.

She is… me.

Not alone. Not unhappy.

Glowing. Vibrant. Fulfilled.

Sunlit and smiling in my direction, as if she can see straight through me.

“Look at what could be. What are you afraid of? There is so much beauty to be found here.” She calls across the meadow.

Longing blooms in my soul as vibrant as the Technicolor keyhole. An ache so vast I might just die if I don’t step over the threshold. My heels twitch.

I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.

I place a hand on the doorknob. A darker voice reverberates in my bones. Not childlike, yet still somehow my own.

You will never be good enough.

I pull my hand away from the door like it has burned me, and I become suddenly aware of the skeleton that lurks beneath my skin, my fingers now drying and chapped.

I sink to the ground, defeated. The candle sputters.

“Maybe just a bit longer.”