After the Metal Door Stopper

Someone had left me a book with two definitions of a door:
the first is simply an entrance. The second one, which I prefer, is
the structure that separates one space from another. My
definitional preoccupation derives from a memory hinged in a
back corner: once, I sprinted into a metal door stopper, which
then severed my pinky toe. I guess I’m also in love with you, an
architect, so I call you up. Back to the inset story, though, blood
spooled out the no-longer crevice of my toes like yarn, unevenly
like the word

maroon, tangled up in my pitched-up screams of
monochromatic pain. Perforated tissue, almost foaming, creamy
like a strawberry sundae. Childhood ephemera, my now-obsolete
skin folded backward, my pinky toe just a golden knob.

I was four and thought, I will die young in the back of this
ambulance—sometimes I still do. In the pediatric hospital, my
body sutured through a metallic-tasting frame, how I wanted to be
prescribed boyish. Less concerned with the furniture
the hematologist politely warned that the metal would soon
corrode my bloodstream, slamming a door of some sort.

You interrupt by suggesting that the new categorical binary of
people is those who interpret the cause of doors to open versus to
close. I continued that the nurse injected
tetanus shots into my arm that opened the door in me but
didn’t necessarily demolish it. What to do then with the binary?
How do I explain that I’m still deindustrializing my existence,
ridding of ephemera; the frame pretends to shake in me back and
forth like corrosive ghosts. Better to lock away the image of a door
than the undone word because both hold the same pure degree of

exteriority anyway. Abstract letters materialize through
telephone wires. Talking to you this way, everything rusts, which is
to say, I am seeking redefinition after redefinition, engendering
newness like a threshold.

Connor Arakaki is a writer at Yale University, where they serve as the current Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Herald.