No One Is Waiting Outside My Door

I took this picture a year ago today, through the peep hole in my apartment door. I had been here, in my new home, for a little over a month, and I had been ruminating about a poignant story I might write including a character who was not me but a scapegoat and therapeutic creative proxy whose quiet new life far away from where he everyone but still full of the mundane and lonely business of keeping one's self alive. In the story, the character would frequently stand at the peep hole of his apartment door, hoping that someone from far away might come to surprise him.

He knew no one was coming. 

But still he couldn’t stop performing this ritual. He couldn’t totally let go of the fantasy. 

As I was writing-this-story-in-my-head, I decided to take a picture through my peep hole. I would, I thought, eventually enlarge the photo, and frame it and submit it to an art show. 

It’s title would be: 

NO ONE IS WAITING OUTSIDE MY DOOR.

I knew there would be somebody who would see that prize-winning, blown up photograph with such austere form and stoic feeling.  And they would think to themselves: Didn’t I read a story about a character who was constantly looking out his peephole waiting for someone to arrive and surprise him? Who wrote that story?  And they would go searching through the Reddit posts about obscure fiction, and, unbelievably, they would find another person who would have the exact same situation: where that other person had read that particular story, and had seen this particular piece of art, but in their case, they had seen and read in reverse order.

The two of them exchanged messages in the Reddit thread for about a day and then were shocked to realize that they both lived around the corner from each other in St Paul, Minnesota. They would agree to meet for Pho at that place on University Avenue. The little one on the corner, surrounded by parking lots. Their vibe grew intensely quickly - so many coincidental nodes of memory and humor!  So much to share! In the melee of it all they would both totally forget about the short story and about the massive prize-winning photo until many years later as one of them prepared a little speech for the others wake - on the origins of a 30 year friendship. 

They would, just out of curiosity, google the short story again, this time discovering it right away - but in the strangest imaginable form.  There was a group of fans who called themselves Peep Holes, all of whom had loved the story as they remembered it, but ironically had also never been able to get their hands on a copy - the literary journal having gone out of print shortly after it’s publication.  The Peep Holes had actually staged a performance of their collectively remembered and reconstructed version of the story at a local theatre festival in Ottawa City many years ago. Someone’s uncle had videotaped the performance using his  phone and posted it on the web, and the sound was so hard to hear, but the bereaved friend watched it all and tears steamed down their face as they smiled and nodded.  

This was it. This was exactly the story that they remembered. The story included long forgotten details including the sequence when the man named each of his plants and the mustard incident and the heart attack that ended up being a fart that no one smelled.  All of it tragically hilarious in a subtle way.

Later that night, last year, after I took the picture, I went for a walk around the oval at the Government Center and was shocked to see a fox in a field, who stopped to patiently observe me.  

Foxes signify an elusive archetype of wildness for me, based on some earlier memories, and so just stand there for a long time looking at each other - me and the fox - seemed unbelievable.  I took a picture.  Still he didn't leave.  

In those moments, I believe that he gave just enough wildness to keep going.  

And if you scroll back in my grid you’ll find fox day and in the journey to get there you’ll see that it was actually quite a bit of wildness, as I’ve had some big adventures over the past year and seen some lovely things and been happy more often than not.

So does the peephole hold only the meanings it had before the fox encounter?  Or does the fortuitous fact of his appearance blur backward into the meaning and change the loneliness into something else?  Does the fox's stare undo the pho, and the pizza-party-rehearsals for the Peep Holes leading up to their five sold out performances?  

Isn’t it funny how the appearance of a lingering fox turns everything wild?