Crushed Velvet

It began, like so many things in her life, with broken powder. It seemed like any type of pressed powder reacted to the touch of her hand like it was a like-charge magnet. First dates, graduations, interviews and funerals - they all kicked off with cracked powder being worked into a carpet or scattered across parquet, linoleum or glazed tiles.

Kneeling down on the floor of her apartment – hardwood! – and unenthusiastically trying to salvage some of the powder, she felt exhausted. She gently pinched the asymmetric sides of the chunks of powder that had stayed compressed and watched them dissolve into dust, one after the other, as she tried to pick them up.

She rubbed her fingers against her thighs, sullying the denim with beige streaks, then unfolded her legs, laid down on the naked floorboards and stared at the ceiling.  She was so tired. Not in body, but in spirit. Over the last days, weeks, months, a deep, existential boredom had crept across her skin, burrowed deep into her flesh, and settled in her bones. Her body ached with the tedium of life.

She was so sick of it all. It just never ended. It was grotesque. Day after day, year after year, she just repeated the same patterns. Little details changed but that was all just a trick; like when you rearrange to contents of the hamster cage to give little Pascal the thrill of his life.

At the end of the day, there was always another day. And another. And another. Ad nauseam.

There was nothing objectively terrible about the building blocks that made up her life. When she broke it down into separate pieces there was little fault to be found. She studied work, home, relationships, interests and family under her loupe but couldn’t find an imperfection or impurity significant enough to explain the thick, wet blanket of malaise that had draped itself around her.      

She had to accept that there was nothing broken. Nothing to be fixed. She was just bored. She was bored to her very bones. She was bored with her apartment, with her boyfriend, with her job, with her friends, with the bills, with travelling, with eating, with sex, with wiping her ass, brushing her teeth, clipping her nails, drying her hair, seeing her face reflected back in mirrors and spoons.  But most of all she was tired, bored senseless, of the never-ending stream of her own thoughts. Her stretched-out, wrung-out, limp, colourless,  threadbare consciousness.

She let her head fall to the side and felt the cold floor against her cheek. She didn’t know what to do. She felt claustrophobic. Stuck inside a prison that had no walls but oppressed her all the same.

Not even death seemed like a possible escape. At its core,  the problem wasn’t that she wanted to die –  it’s that she wanted to live. Really live. But she was starting to doubt if that was really possible. She craved clarity, but existence seemed increasingly dull and blurred.

She stared at the wall. It was dressed in a vintage wallpaper that everyone had told her was gaudy and told her to get rid of when she bought the flat. And she had gotten rid of it,  most of it anyway,  and covered the walls of her bedroom in a faux whitewash instead, but she’d left one wall alone as an accent. She thought the wallpaper had character. It was a deep, mossy green with an intricate, flocked velvet, damask pattern. She used to run her finger across the wall and enjoy the rich texture. You didn’t see wallpaper like that these days.

Absentmindedly, she began tracing the velvet pattern with her eyes. Leaves furled and unfurled, floral sprigs stretched out luxuriously, and flourishing baroque blossoms flaunted their thick petals. Her gaze drifted listlessly across the wall until something broke her trance. She furrowed her brow and traced the nearly imperceptible lines that broke the dense pattern. Four, thin lines cut through the pattern and combined in the shape of a small square about the size of her oven door.

Suddenly alert, she sat back up. She crawled towards the wall and traced the square with her fingers. It was a door. She let her hand drop. She couldn’t understand how she’d never seen it before. It didn’t seem possible. It was as if it had appeared out of thin air. She ran her fingers across the flocked square until she felt a dip. She leaned forward until nose nearly touched the wall. Hidden in the middle of a flower was a small, antique-looking keyhole.

She leaned back again. She had no idea what to do next, nor where to find a key for the strange door. She fished her phone out of her pocket and checked the time. She was already late, but if she left now, she could blame it on traffic. There was no point in opening the door. She knew that on the other side of that wall was the street. At best, there were a few inches between the door and the outer wall. Presumably, the door had been built to give easy access to cables or pipes that had been fitted inside the cavity wall.

She glanced at the hidden door, the powder on the floor, her phone, her bedroom door, and back to the mysterious keyhole. She put her phone back in her pocket and unfastened a bobby pin from her hair.

She felt ridiculous as she rolled the bobby pin between her fingers and stared at the keyhole. She had no idea how to pick a lock, but she was pretty sure that bobby pins weren’t actually as great a tool as movies and pre-teen detective novels had led people to believe.

But she didn’t have much of choice. She flattened the bobby pin, then bent one end into a 90-degree angle. Not expecting much, she slipped her makeshift wrench into the keyhole. After feeling the pin hit the back of the lock, she carefully twisted it and to her amazement, she felt something move, then click.

She paused with her finger still pinching the bobby pin. Then, she gently pulled it towards herself, but it slipped and slid out of the lock without pulling the door with it. Trembling, she removed another bobby pin from her hair. She bent it double to create a sturdier hook, then slipped it inside the keyhole and tried to hook it around the inner edge of the lock. Again, she pulled the pin towards her, and this time the door moved slightly before the pin slipped out.

Now, The door had opened enough that she was able to force her fingernails between the edge of the door and the wall, and with some effort, she pulled the door open. Through the low opening, she glimpsed pale floorboards. With her heart pounding, and her muscles shaking, she bent down further and stuck her head past the open door.

On the other side, she saw neither pipes and cables nor the street that should have been there.

Instead, she saw her own bedroom.  Confused, she crawled into the room and stood up. She looked around.

It was her bedroom. It looked exactly like the room she’d left, only everything was flipped. Slowly she walked through the room, touching her bed, her plants, her desk. It was a perfect mirror image of her room, even her half-drunk glass of wine that she’d left on her nightstand while doing her makeup was there. The only thing missing was the broken powder. In its place was pile of broken glass.

Unnerved, opened the bedroom door and was both pleased and alarmed by finding that the door opened up into the kitchen,  just like in the flat she’d just left. Amazed, she looked around. The kitchen table was to her left, rather than her right, and so was the window. But though everything was flipped around, there was no question that this was her kitchen. This was her apartment.

She walked through the kitchen and into the hallway. She explored the bathroom and the living room. It was all the same, yet not the same at all.

Walking back into the kitchen, she noticed something on floor, under the kitchen table. She bent down and saw that it was a small, silver, skeleton key. She picked up the key and studied it. She was sure that while her empty bowl of cereal was soaking in this sink as well as back in her own, there was no key hiding in her kitchen.

She walked back into the bedroom and looked out the window. There was a whole world out there. Familiar, yet completely unknown. She walked back to the secret door, kneeled down and looked back on her room.

She reached through the opening, grabbed the edge of the door, and gently pulled it towards herself. She stuck the skeleton key in the lock and found that it fit perfectly, as she knew it would. For a second, she hesitated, then she pulled the door closed and twisted the key.