Doorways

by Andrya Otto (conceptualised using A.I.)

She always lived in doorways.

As a child, she would stand there, one foot in each room, without committing to either side. It wasn’t a game to her. It wasn’t something she did for fun or because she could. She had no choice. The doorway was the one part of the house that didn’t fully belong to either room. If she stayed there, she didn’t have to decide which room to go in or who she had to be once she walked into it. Neither side felt safe to land in, so she stopped trying to land anywhere at all. She stood in that gap, silently. That space was one that didn’t ask anything of her.

She understands it differently now, but at the time, the gap was the only safe place she knew. She didn’t have to put on a mask to get anywhere or take one off to leave anywhere. She was just in between, and being in between was the one thing she could handle. She didn’t have that security in either room.

People tend to think of an in-between space as empty, such as a hallway with nothing in it, a space where you can just pass through with nothing happening around you. That’s not how it was for her. That in-between space is where she felt most productive, and the real work was done. It was where she figured out which version of herself is okay to bring into which room, and which version had to stand outside of it. She knows now that it was never her that was the problem in those rooms, but back then that was all she was told. So, she spent her time building a version of herself specifically for the doorway. A child that was quiet and ready to adjust to whatever was to come on the other side. That doorway version was that one thing she had built entirely on her own.

Some of that appears to have carried into the way she now paints on canvas. She works with paint in a clean, flat style, with sharp outlines and clear edges between each shape her brush creates. She was oblivious to the link between her painting style and standing in the doorway as a child. Looking back now, she can see how obvious it is now. The outlines of her shapes are essentially a threshold, except its one she actual has control over. It’s just a line now that shows where one thing stops and the next one starts, and unlike when she was child, she gets to decide exactly where the lines go. When she mixes her palette, or when she’s deciding how much of the underpainting shows through, it’s identical to deciding where a boundary sits, on purpose, instead of just standing in one that already exists.

Growing up never got rid of the doorway feeling. It just moved. For a long time, she was stuck between who she was becoming and the version of herself other people had already decided she was. It’s a unique kind of unsettling – never quite being allowed to just be where you are, always stuck between who you used to be and who you’re supposed to turn into next. She became accustomed to it. She got so used to living in that gap that she almost forgot a hallway was supposed to lead somewhere.

What’s different now is what happens when she ends up back in that kind of in-between. She doesn’t freeze with a foot either side of the doorway the way she used to as a child. She keeps walking, as hard as it may be. She might move slowly, but she still puts one foot in front of the other and continues on, because she understands something now that she didn’t back then. She understands that a doorway is only somewhere to live if you decide to stay there. Otherwise, it’s just a part of the house you pass through on the way to whatever place you’re going.

She still doesn’t know what’s waiting on the other side of a lot of the doorways ahead of her, or who she may be by the time she gets to them. But that’s not something she needs to know before she enters a room anymore. That’s probably the main thing that living in-between taught her. You don’t need to see the whole room to trust that it’s there. You just have to keep moving forward, one edge at a time, the same way she paints them. Being sure of the line, even before she knows everything it’s eventually going to shape.