Behind The Door

                                                 Behind the Door

     I stood in front of the door. My heart was beating slower than I could ever remember, my breaths came and went, but I did not notice them, all I could contemplate was the door. It was the same one I had seen all those years ago. Slowly I drifted back in my memories to that day. The day the door first came to me. It was not unlike now, me standing in front of the door. It was simple enough, a wooden door, a knob the color of copper or maybe bronze, the size of my closed fist. It was placed in a gray wall, in a small room, the only door there. The room itself had no windows, no exits, just the door.
     I remembered that, when I first tried to grab the knob, a man came out of the shadows behind me and took my hand gently, he was dressed in a white tunic, it reached down to his feet. He turned me slowly and gently, like a mother or father would treat a new born child. He looked into my eyes and I noticed his face was bearded, his hair short and curly and black, his eyes where brown and his skin was like the color of dirt.
     “You can’t open that door yet” he told me in a quiet and magnificent voice. He took my hand in his. “Someday you can open it, but not now” he said as he led me across the room. Then it went blurry and the next I remember, I was waking up in a hospital bed, my mother asleep on a chair in the side. I tried to take off the breath mask I had but the cold hands of the doctors and nurses would not let me.
      I was nine when that happened. Ever since I have searched for the door, never finding it, at first my parents thought of it as a game, a child’s imagination. While I grew I began to try to forget it. But it never left my thoughts; it began to grow, to take root in my mind, to eat at my conscience. I began, and have continued through all my life, to check every door I came too, to ask what was behind them, but I never found the door I was seeking.
      I learned to hide my interest, my obsession, with the door, I pried and I looked, and I opened every door I came across, but none where the door I longed for. I could feel they weren’t, every time I touched their knobs or handles, I could feel it wasn’t the door I wanted to see, but I still tried. My life past and I never found the door.
      Until now. I am now ninety-two years of age, and it is now that I see the door once again. It hadn’t changed, the same wood, the same knob, the same room, no rust nor shine to make it seem old or new. I reached my hand and took the knob, no man came to stop me this time. As I turned it ever slowly, I recalled why I was in the hospital, it was for an ear operation, I remembered now that my parents told me that something had gone wrong and I was almost lost.
      I continued to turn the knob till I heard a click, and began to push it open. Slowly I realized why it was that I had seen the door before, I had been near death, but the Doctors saved me, and the man stopped me the first time, because it was not my day to open it. Now it was my day, the long awaited day, and I tell you fare reader, the reason was because when I opened the door, I saw eternity, and I tell you this, do not fear death, for eternity is beautiful.