The door had been there for as long as she could remember.
At the end of the garden, in the wall, a wooden door that her parents had always kept locked. She'd asked about it as a child and been told: it's just a wall, it doesn't go anywhere. She'd accepted this and grown up and left and come back only occasionally, until her parents died and she was clearing the house and found, in a drawer, the key.
It was a Saturday in October. She unlocked the door.
It opened into an alley behind the houses — an ordinary alley, slightly overgrown, used for nothing much. Not a secret garden. Not a passage to another world. Just an alley.
She stood in the doorway between the two spaces.
And then she stood there for a while longer.
Not because of what was on the other side — the other side was ordinary. But because of the doorway itself. The particular quality of being between the two places. One foot in the garden of her childhood and one foot in the alley of the wider world.
She thought about all the thresholds she'd stood in. The endings and the beginnings. The moments of not-yet-one-thing and not-yet-another. She'd spent her life wanting to get through the doorways as fast as possible, to be on one side or the other.
She stood in this one for a long time.
The between is not empty.
She'd been wrong about that.
The between is where you actually are, most of the time, if you're honest about it. Between the old thing and the new one. Between who you were and who you are becoming.
She left the door open when she went back in.
It seemed right.
The threshold is not nothing. The threshold is where you live.
