Through the Doorway
Julia Offen
It starts when you enter a new room, or even just pause in a doorway, neither here nor there. Now, what was I...? You check your hands. Maybe you’ve got a torn-open piece of mail you’re taking to the desk to put in the pay-this-bill-now-or-you’ll-regret-it stack of mismatched pink and red-splashed paper. That’s a quick puzzle you can figure out.
Or you’re holding a washcloth. This one would be less obvious. It’s not damp, and you’re not half-way into or out of the bathroom, so that’s really no help. It has a helpful dried smear of blood on one corner so at least you know it’s not an escapee from the clean laundry basket waiting to be folded and put away. What it’s doing in your hand may be a mystery you’ll never solve.
Doorways are liminal. Thresholds. Where you enter a new space. What happened to thinking of them as exits, you wonder? Escape routes? Where is that in the dictionary definition of liminal? That must be in a psychology essay somewhere. Surely someone explains that invisible barrier your mind decides it doesn’t need to cross. But we can look at that doorway otherwise.
Liminality, such a celebrated concept in anthropology literature! You step out from one stage of being, into a ritual of crossing. Transitioning to another social role. You were single, you had a wedding, now you’re married. You were a student, maybe you processed through a thesis defense and strode across a stiflingly humid stage in your school graduation, now you are a scholar. Respect, socially earned and acknowledged (alas, job not included).
How boring, really. The exciting part is that liminal phase, the “betwixt and between” in the rite-of-passage where you’re beholden to neither social role. Expectations fall by the wayside, all kinds of hitherto unimaginable futures and normally never-to-be- dreamed-of escape routes glisten all around you. Ah, you’re dangerous then. That’s the fun part.
You can see why anthropologist-scholars might be obsessed with all the ambiguity, all that potential. Were you? Probably, yes. You’d have to check your files to know the extent. Not digital files, but actual messy steel file cabinets with sticky rollers, disorganized drawers stuffed with half-drafted research ideas, twenty-seven yellowed versions of the same essay and its reviews eventually published in an entirely unrecognizable form on an apparently different topic entirely, and thirty-something-year-old receipts for hiring a graphics expert to turn your field photographs into slides you could use for state-of-the-art research presentations back in the dark, pre-digital ages. Boy could academicians run-on, eh?
None of this is helping you figure out why you entered this room. Your hands, as you probably guessed, are now empty and unhelpful. But you muddle along. Maybe go feed the dogs, even though it’s an hour early for that. At least someone in this house will be happy.
Everyone experiences this, right? You’re not growing that old. Or not in that way, not yet. Except that these passages—the barriers or moments your brain decides it can reset itself—keep coming more frequently. No sense denying it, you’re only talking to yourself anyway. Sometimes it’s at the mere turn of a head, a minute shift of your body, or a fleeting contemplation of the palm at the end of the mind.
When did multi-tasking involve so many lists? Or, let’s not kid ourselves, single- tasking now. And where was that list you were just looking at? If only you were good at following recipes, but you never even tried. Your most stunning creations never followed rules (your most abject failures, too, but hey that’s just the price we artists pay). Step-by- step rules are for suckers, right? Merely suggestions to spin your own improvisation around. Jazz, baby. Swing to it.
Okay, sure, you had intentions. You were going somewhere. Trying to do something. Maybe even something important.
But this is what I’m here to remind us, once I write it down somewhere: Just don’t forget all those diverting possibilities amazingly opened up, only waiting to be noticed. Rearrange that furniture, phone someone you haven’t talked to in a decade to ask about that incredible chocolate mousse recipe they used to make and how in the world did they get it so creamy (it was mascarpone, by the way). Step outside and dig your bare toes into the mulch or ice plant of the yard. Smile benignly at the neighbors who pause to look concerned.
Neural connections shrivel with age, but we create new ones every day, every moment, every step through a door. Neural plasticity, you must have read about it somewhere. Our nervous system’s amazing ability to grow, react and adapt. To optimistically reorganize itself, free to go sideways and slantways and longways and backways. Strive to embrace it. I mean, really, what else are you going to do?
And maybe try to blot up that blood trickling down where you bumped your temple on the door jam before it dries next time. No wonder your neighbor is so worried about you.
Julia Offen
Julia L. Offen is a writer, anthropologist, and editor living in beautiful coastal California after years spent trotting across North America and Europe. She facilitates creative writing workshops, and her own creative prose has been published in Green Mountains Review, Ethnography, Orca Literary Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Anthropology and Humanism, Urban People, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is the ethnographic fiction and creative nonfiction editor for the journal Anthropology and Humanism. She earned her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine, and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at San Diego.