11/08/2025
The door was half open, just enough for the light to spill through and catch the curve of a chair leg. The paint on the frame had worn thin near the handle, a faint trace of hands that had paused there before mine. I don’t remember if I was on my way in or simply passing by — only that I stopped, my palm resting against the frame without the intent to push it any further.
The air was still, the kind of stillness that presses against you. It carried that faint, dry scent of wood warmed by sunlight, though the room itself was dim. Somewhere inside, a clock ticked — not sharp, but soft and irregular, like it had been keeping time for so long it no longer cared about precision. I’ve always thought clocks rarely match the mood of the rooms they occupy; they either run ahead, impatient, or drag just behind, reluctant to keep up.
It brought up the memory of another doorway — narrower, darker — where I’d paused in almost the same way, as though standing in thresholds was a quiet habit I’d been practicing for years without naming it. That time, I’d been listening to voices in the next room, the low hum of conversation breaking now and then into a pause that carried more weight than the words themselves. You don’t need to hear the sentences to know when the meaning changes.
Maybe that’s what it is — the space between knowing and not knowing that draws me to these places. The pause at the edge of something. The way the body leans forward but the hand doesn’t follow.
Woolf’s words find their way in here easily. Scattered, because I can never quite place which doorway belongs to which day, or if I’ve folded more than one into the same memory. Various, because each pause wears a different expression — hesitation, curiosity, even the relief of not having to choose. Gregarious, because even in silence, the exchange is there: me and the light, me and the voices, me and the room I may or may not enter.
I didn’t go in. The light stayed where it was, pooling on the chair, patient. But I carried a piece of it with me, as if I’d taken something without asking.
When’s the last in-between place you lingered in long enough for it to feel like it was holding you there on purpose?
