The Door of Unmade Choices: Chapter 24
CHAPTER 24 – CHOOSING NOW
The diner was quieter in the morning. Different quiet. Less
haunted. The kind that belonged to bacon grease and early risers instead of
unresolved lives. Frank sat in the same booth as the night before, staring at
the same menu, but it didn’t feel like a trap this time. Instead, it felt
available.
The Door hadn’t appeared yet. New behavior for a door.
Usually they are all too eager to lure you with their siren’s song. Frank took
a sip of coffee, smiling in spite of its general badness.
It feeds on too late, he thought Not failure. Not
regret. Not even longing. Too late. The phrase had weight now. He could
feel how often he’d used it—like punctuation at the end of every unfinished
thought.
Too late to start over. Too late to be good at it. Too late
to matter.
The Door loved that part. It lived there. Camped out in the
space between maybe someday and not anymore.
Frank looked around the diner. The waitress wiped down the
counter. A man at the far end read the paper like it was a sacred scroll.
Someone laughed in the kitchen. None of it felt monumental. None of it felt
like a door. He looked at me, searching my eyes for answers.
“I’m scared,” he told me. “I know what I need to do but I’m
afraid. I’ve always been afraid.”
“The Door didn’t want big choices,” I said. “It wants
deferral. It wants you to save yourself for a moment that never arrived.”
He rubbed his face before saying, “Did you go to school to
learn how to talk like that? Special training? Or were you born this way?”
His question caused my subconscious to go down rabbit holes
of my past. Was I born like this? Had it always been there? Or have I been
shaped by the universe or other forces?
Frank reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He
stared at the cracked screen and his own reflection looking back at him. He
scrolled past things he’d bookmarked for later. Past notes titled Someday
and When Things Settle. Past half-formed ideas that had waited so long
they’d fossilized.
He stopped at one name. It was someone he’d meant to call
six months ago. Someone he’d thought about often. Someone he’d told himself
he’d reach out to when things were less complicated. Frank hesitated. The
old feeling stirred. He embraced the familiar tightening, the instinct to wait
for the right version of himself to show up first.
Too late, the Door whispered somewhere in the back of
his mind.
“No,” Frank said aloud.
The word surprised him with how solid it felt.
He hit call. It rang. Once. Twice.
The Door appeared then. Not fully. Just the suggestion of
it—reflected faintly in the diner window, like a smudge someone hadn’t wiped
away properly. No humming or pulling. Only watching.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice said on the other end of the line.
“Wow. Hi.”
Frank swallowed. “Hi. I know this is out of nowhere. I
just—” He stopped himself. Took a breath. “I didn’t want to keep saying I’d
call someday.”
There was a pause.
“I’m glad you did,” the voice said.
Outside, the reflection in the window shifted. The Door
narrowed like it was recalibrating and assessing the situation.
Frank didn’t feel cured or fixed. But he felt present.
The tightness relented and he breathed easier. The two of them spoke for a few
minutes. Small talk, catching up. It wasn’t a deep conversation where they
explored their long-dormant feelings. They didn’t hash out all the old hurts.
They just chatted for a spell. When Frank hung up, the Door was gone. Frank
knew that didn’t mean the door had been defeated. If anything, he understood the
door would be back with unmet needs. Payment in full.
Frank finished his coffee. Paid the bill. Looked across the booth
at me as I lit a cigarette. Smoking isn’t allowed in The Perpetual Egg but it
is ignored.
“What now?” he asked me.
“That’s the tricky part,” I told him. “Doors fear now.”
Frank stared at me long enough to make me uncomfortable.
“I swear,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re like the world’s
worst self-help guru.”
“I get that a lot.”
I offered him a cigarette and he took it, despite proclaiming
he doesn’t smoke. We sat together in silence, contemplating what now.
Comments
Post a Comment