In the broken place of the human mind.

There is a room. That room has white walls, no windows. It has a door. Closed, iron and painted with peeling gray paint.
There is also a man. The man is sitting in a chair – black, wood, simple.
That man has dark hair, blue eyes and the undefined look of either an abused twenty-something or a well-kept forty-year-old. He needs to shave, and perhaps a bath wouldn’t go to waste.
But the thought of shaving, bathing or even water – even though his throat is raspy with the signs of having been thirst for a trifle too long – are far from his mind.
Only one thing – or maybe two, depends how one’d look at it – is on his mind. The door – or better, crossing said door. And what’s beyond it.
He’s not sure what’s outside the dour white walls, which is a softened way to say he has absolute no idea what’s outside. But he can, as one always cans, guess within reasonable logic – and that limiting it, so it can’t be “absolute no idea”, can it?
But then again, he could guess outside the called ‘reasonable logic’. And who’s to say it’d be wrong? Outside that room could very well be a desert of purple sand, with a red-haired woman of many arms riding a golden Chinese dragon of good fortune. And she could very well, the moment he stepped outside the door, come to him, take him by the hand and tell him fantastic stories of love and silver while they watched the two moons set.
It could be. Who know?
Or maybe there could be a whole different setting behind that door: maybe it opened out into the busy cities of New York. Maybe he was in a back room of an illegal sweatshop in Malaysia. Maybe the door opened up into the universe, or maybe it lead into thin air, only a seventeen story drop waiting outside.
He let himself and his mind wander through all the mundane and fantastic scenarios, all – he told himself – equally possible.
After all, how could he know – he remembered nothing; he did have a feeling he knew quite some, though he had no way of confirming said feeling.
But there was one thing he knew and knew to be right – the door was meant to be crossed. There was no particular rush for that action to be accomplished – he knew that with a certainty, too. And so he took his time.
There could be either certain death or seas of pleasure behind that door. And he was well aware of all of this – and yet, neither of the options enticed a particularly strong sensation in him. Even the curiosity he had to know wasn’t what one might call gnarling – in fact, he felt much more of an eerily detached sort of amusement as he entertained himself with the possibilities. Maybe there was just another room, exactly like the one he was in, with a man exactly like him, sitting in a chair exactly like his, thinking the very same thoughts; perhaps just the room and the chair, no man.
The man blinked. His eyes felt dry, as though as he had forgot to blink during the time his eyes had laid fixedly staring at the door. Which maybe he had, but one is never sure of those things unless another person had been watching the first.
In a swift but graceful movement he stood up, and in two strides arrived at the door. His hand went slowly, deliberately, to the doorknob, caressing it briefly before turning it.
The door was ajar. The man grinned.
The desert air felt warm against his cheek.
-
Somewhere, not there, a man curses and lets a sense of failure wash over him, flooding his mind like the background hum of a stopped hearth.

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