No Handle

The lock on my apartment door is different from the one in my family home. The key goes in upside down, and there is no handle to lift up when locking the door behind you. It just swings shut with a click. Back at home, the door has a handle, and the key goes in the way it’s supposed to. At least the way I think it’s supposed to. But now, when I visit home, I seem to have forgotten how the key fits. For a moment that stretches like the wisdom teeth bursting through my gums, I am locked out of my house. Struggling to fit an upside-down key into a lock, while inside my family sits and swallows patiently, unaware as I mash my key against the lock.

What does it mean to forget these small details?

Stuck outside, forgetting the things in my life that were once so constant, I never imagined them to be consequential. But what about the other details of a life? Suddenly, it’s not just the lock on the front door of my home anymore. No, it is the colour of green that flecks my mother’s eyes and the twist of my baby sister’s smile.

Now my life is full of other things. Not better, not worse, just other. The city smells cling to my hair and the candle stubs we burn instead of flicking on the light. The slant writing of my grandfather left behind in every book and scrap of paper can not be found in the piles of books slowly growing in the corner of my room. When I make my scrambled eggs in the morning, I can’t help but think how my father always made them better, but it has been so long since I have been home for lazy Sunday breakfasts, I have begun to wonder was it all made up?

And then the door unlocks. I’ve fixed the key in right. A fuss over nothing, a silly mistake. But there is my brother standing in the kitchen, and suddenly he is taller than me and outside my granny is planting flowers in the garden except I don’t remember seeing the ones from last year bloom. I must have missed that.

But I love lying on my balcony with the sun hot on my skin while my friend tells me a story. Where brown leather boots and lipstick stains and cigarette butts live. And it is so nice that I have so much time to write, tucked away behind my apartment door that shuts with a click. Now I live in places where doors have floors and numbers printed on them, but no handles. At home, houses have names and doors stand on their own, not crowded by other doors like a rabbit’s burrow.

And I am grateful to live where my little red camera takes pictures of the friends that come to visit me, where we play cards on the wooden floor, and the strawberry-painted jug drips ice onto the table. That evenings are spent reading in the peachy summer light, and my friend makes me tea while we watch television. The apartment is pink and white and purple, and we host dinner parties and paint flowerpots, and the sun has already faded the blanket on the couch.

But I find it a little sad when I start to forget the things that came before the door with a number and no handle. And then after a weekend at home how the lock in my apartment door confuses me and from outside my numbered door I can smell onions frying and I can hear my best friend laughing and I am trying once again to mash my way through another door, desperate to get back to the life that I know. But what about that other life? The one with fresh linen hanging on a wire line and cheek kisses from siblings, not yet tired of me. And what about this life, where I cook the dinner and wine warms in water glasses because we have no wine glasses left, and we laughed and laughed every time I held up the broken shards of glass like a heart beating in my palms. And then I start to panic because why does the key not fit until I remember, and the door opens and shuts with a click, and laughter turns to hello when the last thing I said was goodbye.

 My name is Hannah-Rose and I am a twenty-two-year-old writer from Ireland. I love reading and baking and I am currently working on my debut novel.