The Seventh Door

Lyrics

The hallway is a library of doors.
All white. All paneled. All the same.
The first brass knob is cold enough to burn.
And inside, the room. My room.
8 by 10 feet of memory. Lace curtains on the single window.
The floorboards know my weight, they creak at 2 a.m.
But the ceiling feels closer.
The scent of wool blankets and lavender is a little too loud.
I turn around. The door is gone.
There's just another door where it should be.
The second lock clicks. The room again.
Smaller. The window is now at my knees.
From the hallway I just left, a voice. My mother's.
"Are you sleeping?"
But the hallway is a wall now.
I check my hands. Ten fingers, all accounted for.
The light switch on the wall flickers into a moth and flies away.
This is the door that only opens inward.
This is the room that remembers being bigger.
A photograph folding in on itself.
Each latch is a heartbeat slowing down. Each threshold, a step deeper in.
Third door. Fourth. I am crawling now.
The bed is a shoebox. The window a stamp.
The fifth door has a keyhole the size of a tear.
I press my eye against it and see a corridor of blinking mirrors.
I pull back. The sixth door is here. I have to turn sideways to fit.
The walls press against my ribs.
It smells like dust and the space behind a clock.
The seventh door. The knob isn't cold. It's warm.
The air changes. Smells like rain on hot asphalt.
The floorboards vibrate under my palms.
A choice. A breath.
And I say it to the shrinking space. I say it to myself.
"I'm dreaming."
This is the door that only opens outward.
This is the room that remembers how to grow.
A photograph unfolding into a sky.
The latch is a first breath. The walls dissolve like sugar in water.
The room breathes. It expands past sight.
I raise my hands to the new ceiling, a canvas of deep night.
My fingers leave trails of indigo, gold.
Crimson drips and hangs in the air.
Each drop a soft click, the sound of a star being born.
Ursa Major forms, then a constellation I've never seen.
It breathes with me.