The sliding doors

The Sliding Doors

I still remember, even now, standing before the sliding glass doors at my school entrance when I was thirteen. I watched them open and close repeatedly, my eyes flicking between the motion sensor and the camera above, waiting for someone to walk through. My thoughts had a strange coldness, a detached sense of watching and planning.

That year, something inside me fractured. The rage consumed me was all-encompassing, wild, and for reasons I still cannot fully understand. I sometimes think of that version of myself as madness incarnate, yet I also wonder if it was simply pain with nowhere to go. The flames of my rage burned through my memories and mind, the way a phoenix burns before it rises from its ashes. I have been reborn from those ashes many times since.

That wasn’t the first time I had succumbed to madness—just the most memorable. Still, the image of those doors—and the fury that filled me—haunts me. I can only remember the aching certainty that no one was listening. If they won’t listen, I’ll make them listen. I no longer care who I was that day—the day I screamed before my entire school, the day every failed attempt to speak and be heard. The day I erupted into chaos.

Even now, I still feel that rage deep in my belly. In the past, no amount of effort could contain it; it would rise and consume me, turning me into a being made entirely of fire and fury. To this day, I both fear it and love it. In that rage, I feel the most beautiful and truthful, as if the fires that burn me also create me anew, stripping away all pretense and leaving only raw, undeniable self.

I am pretty sure my rage is insanity—but I am also certain it is sanity. It is a dichotomy, a paradox of emotional intelligence and growth. It teaches me, shapes me, and reminds me that even destructive energy can hold insight, that even chaos can guide the self toward understanding.

Now, I try to give that rage other outlets—by emotionally connecting with others, placing myself in their shoes, and creating beauty through art and imagination. Each act of creation becomes an act of resistance, a way to redirect the fire into something alive instead of destructive. I do everything I can to overcome the rage, the fear, the flames that live inside me. Yet I know there may come a day when I cannot contain it. I fear that day—and I seek it too—because I understand, as an adult, that if I erupt again, real harm could follow.

In my memory of that day, I see a map etched not in ink but in emotion. With narrow corridors of rage, twisting and dark, where I lost myself in fire. Fields of memory are burned and barren, waiting for new growth. And there are the high peaks of rebirth, where I climb from ash to air, learning the contours of myself again and again. Each scar, each outburst, each quiet recovery is a landmark. The sliding doors remain a waypoint on that map, a reminder of how close I came to being lost, and how far I have come since.

In that map, madness is a place of destruction and a survival terrain. Rage is a river, flooding and sometimes frozen. Silence is a canyon where echoes of the self can gather. And rebirth is always the sunrise, tracing the horizon and pointing the way forward.

I am still walking that map, tracing the paths that once threatened to swallow me. But now, I carry it consciously—each memory and emotion a coordinate, each scar a compass, each rebirth a new route through the intangible landscape of who I am.