grave of the fireflies

At 1:45 AM somebody knocked on the door.  They kept knocking.  Sometime after 3:00 AM they knocked their last.  I don’t like it when people come to visit, unannounced, at 2 in the morning.  I especially don’t like it when they –presumably a friend, though I don’t think I can tell the difference between a real friend and a smiling enemy– continues knocking for over an hour.  Is it just deliberate torture?  ..from a friend?  Or is it some former-friend, a malcontent who has maintained some simmering grievance toward me and has chosen the angsty and insane part of night, the wee hours, to address it? 

In my apartment it is nearly impossible to escape from an unwelcome knock at my door.  I have a studio, and no part of the apartment (except for the closet in the bathroom) is more than ten feet from one or the other door, and he used both doors last night.  And as it happens, my dishwasher was running when he arrived.  My dishwasher is noisy.  From outside my apartment in the hall, it sounds like I am taking a shower and having a tantrum at the same time.  It’s not repetitious noise either, it really makes it sound like someone is moving around in here.  Have you ever hated your dishwahser for telling the truth? 

I am most certainly nuts.  It would have been so much simpler to have just opened the door and said, ‘go away.’  But would he (or she) –no reason to be chauvinist about my paranoia– have gone?  Once his (or her) intent to torture me was clear, it was not much of a leap then to envision all sorts of violent intents festering outside my door, hovering just above the shadow that I could see through the space under the door. 

Let me clarify a bit; this knocking was gentle, at times even timid.  This was not the door-rapping that accompanies an emergency or crisis, at least not the kind that involve fire or police.  And any friend who knows that I might sit rigid unto sore stiffness for two hours also knows that I need more than an anonymous knock in the night before I open the door.  A friend in need would make some announcement from outside the door like, ‘Hey Joe, it’s Jack.  You know, Jack, the ripper.  I gotta use your phone.’ 

Or maybe it’s only the smiling enemies who choose to speak when knocking at my door at midnight, their polished words and pleasant tones a balm to my fevered angst.  And maybe I prefer them; they don’t want a friend, they are not seeking a quote-unquote relationship.  Whatever they want, they do not want me to be real.  No matter what bizarre imagined danger a smiling enemy might represent, it is never worse to me than the threat posed by a friend.  It is by friendship that we get real.  I will not survive the transition from me to real. 

He (or she) took a break around two-thirty; the shadow moved away from the door.  I took the opportunity to stealthily reposition myself in front of my monitor.  No turning lights on or off, no closing blinds, and no standing upright even –the knocker may be watching from outside, and the shadow may return at any moment.  And it did. 

I had been planning to watch Grave of the Fireflies.  So I did.  I crawled across the floor to my chair, turned off the sound and started playing the DVD.  English subtitles.  An occasional knock at the door.  No music.  There is at least a novel’s worth of irony in the image of me watching an anime movie about the homelessness, starvation, and deaths of a young Japanese boy and his little sister, orphaned at the end of World War II, all the while ignoring someone who obviously knows me –and for all I know needed me, or maybe needed just a place to stay last night– standing at my door less than ten feet away, alone in the hall outside my apartment. 

A true crisis never happens outside of our own hearts. 

The movie was a diversion from my imaginings of murder and mayhem lurking outside my door.  It also diverted my attention away from the insane behavior in which I had already invested an hour, and subsequently three hours.  And with the addition of this post now, four hours.  If the insanity ever ends, I won’t be happy.  It is my life. 

By the way, get that movie if you haven’t seen it.  And watch it twice, once without making a sound.