I open the door.

Strange, out of tune music begins playing and the sight that greets me is a that of prim white diamonds blinking against a pitch black background. With no hesitation I look for the girl with the Sun in her eyes - but she isn’t there. I promptly back out and close the door (maybe another time). I find myself again in the same room as before, surrounded by doors.

They say that the measure of one’s liberty is twofold. One is how many doors you have available to choose from, the other is being able to choose the door you want out of your own will. There is no meaning to having either a limitless number of doors available to you if you cannot choose them of your own will, nor to being able to choose a door out of your own free will, if that door is not available to you. But if there existed a world in which neither the number of doors nor a limit to your self-determination are a problem, would that make such a world the world of ultimate liberty?

In this world I see nothing. Nothing but doors. Sometimes the doors are shaped a little oddly or have a slightly off colour, but they mostly all look pretty much exactly the same.  There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It rarely has to do with whatever is behind them. It doesn’t matter if there’s joy or sadness, painful anger or dispassionate boredom, in the end, before you ever notice, the room you were in turns back into a room with more doors. Why doors? Sometimes it takes hours, in special cases even days, often it can even take seconds. You always return to the same nothing in the end. I hate all these doors. At least, I want to.

So I open another door.

So why is there nothing you say? How should I know I didn’t bring me here, I don’t want to be here. I’m afraid, and I don’t know where to go – is what I want to say, but I really just don’t care. Or maybe it’s the other way around. See for a while I thought I was clever. I secretly put in effort trying to spot doors that look different. Whenever one turned up I would be overwhelmed with feelings of anxiousness and anticipation. What a discovery! Something big and important must be behind such a door! Something important had to happen!

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

And so it did. Something big clashed into my feelings and turned me inside out and upside down. I felt and I lived and I took an almost perverse joy out of it, whether what happened was good or not.

I had some semblance of control.

But soon I started noticing something worrying. Yes, I hadn’t found what I was looking for, I didn’t have what I really wanted. All my happiness was tinged in that feeling of wanting something simple – effortless and pure - that I never had. Before long it had started eating me from the inside, but what came from the outside was much worse.

Often the normal doors would hold surprises that were just as tumultuous. Often the odd doors would bring my hopes up and then nothing much would happen. Disappointment piled up. I would quietly lie to myself saying that no, I am happy. I am sad. I am angry, I am anxious, I do anticipate – in the end I ended up accepting it.

Those odd doors weren’t any different than any other door.

I used to get into a panic about it before, but now I’ve learned to accept it. You see it’s easier that way. Nothing happens if you panic. You do it for a while and then it leaves you, alone again, empty.

So I open another door.

The door opens. The door opens into an old-looking room. There are paintings hanging on the wooden walls. The roof of the room is slanted, it must be an attic. Soft yellow light emanates from the lamp on the table, drawing a long black shade of a bearded figure on the floor. It’s a late hour and the only noise in the room is a sound like the scratching of bird feet. The figure is scribbling something on paper, but I can only barely make out what it is (it’s because it is night-time). There is a sextant on the table, but it seems like the figure doesn’t use it during the night, only in daytime. At night it paints with a pen. I’m not interested, but I can’t tell why. And so-

So I open another door.

And end up in the same room. In the same room?

(Part 1 END)