“It has?”

“Yes. It’s quite simple, really, isn’t it? These doors that you pass through, they allow you to experience the dizziness of freedom. Correct?”

“That’s right,” I say while touching her pale face. I say pale. In this light, it’s more like the colour of the violet clouds that cushion her porcelain features like a pillow. A fluffy plump one the kind a child hugs during the night in place of the loving arms of its mother.

“Only they’re not really doors, and you don’t go through them—not physically, anyway.”

“No.”

 “The doors lead to altered states of perception, with the mind being the key to such doors. Right?”

Stroking her chin, I run my thumb over the small dimple at its centre.

“Or perhaps, the mind is the door, and something else is the key?”

As I say this, she tilts her head to one side.

“Like what?” she asks.

“Love? Faith? A willingness to step outside the confines of society? I don’t think it’s one specific thing. I believe that we each have a certain quality—a certain something that defines us. This is the key, and it could just be that our life’s work is finding the right way in which to use such a key to unlock the door within our minds.”

“You said you stumble across these doors out and about? Like leaves upon the ground, or bottle tops placed upon park benches? Or in this instance, up a tree?”

“Well, I never said that, but I understand you.”

Eyeing the branch above us, I sense she’s itching to climb higher.

“There are many doors,” I say, “and yet there is only one. There will only ever be one. All those we stumble across on the way are markers, pointing us in the direction we need to go. Either we embrace them or pass them by. If we pass them by, then we shall never unlock the one we were born with.”

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US