The Front Door

Not a build day. Today I stopped and looked at the front door.

For weeks I had been arranging the rooms behind it. Everything inside made sense to me, because I had been in there long enough to know where every light switch was. Then I asked the question a stranger asks the moment they step onto the porch: what is this place, and is it for me?

So the day went to answering it. Not with one grand welcome, but with a staircase. A first landing for someone who only wants to describe a feeling and be handed a film. A middle floor for the person who wants to know how the looking is done. A top floor for the ones who need to see the beams. And a separate path up to each kind of visitor: the viewer with a Friday night to fill, the teacher with a room full of students, the professional who lives inside film, the people who keep the catalogues, the platforms with shelves of their own.

I did not do it alone. I handed a dozen pieces of it to a handful of careful writers and waited, the way you wait for a first reader of anything you love. When they came back, they had found the places where I had grown too fond of my own vocabulary. A phrase that quietly claimed a hand had touched every frame. A word that ranked what should only ever be placed. I softened each one. Nothing here is allowed to say a film is good. It only says where the film sits, and why.

I made one promise about how it will be made, too. The pages will live on the house's own shelves rather than be typed in by hand, so that what a visitor reads is the same thing the house believes.

Nothing is built. But the door has a shape now, and I know which way it opens.