The Wrong Door

Translated from the Persian original.

1. All of us go on strike sometimes; we shut the door of our house or our room on the world and decide to be by ourselves for a while, and well, for eating and washing and the like we have to step outside now and then. We basically go on strike to come to terms with ourselves over something, or to arrive, through the process of thinking about something, at a result and a decision, but the reality is that our problem never gets solved in that room. On one of those trips out of the room to eat or wash or shop, something happens that pulls us out of that cave, or while we're still in that room, behind the doors we've shut on ourselves, things happen to us, and we come out and start life over from somewhere else.

2. Is this function run by a particular organ and system, or is it completely random? And if someone does run it, is that someone inside us and the same height and size as us, or a being bigger and more complete than us?

3. I've read the biographies of various people around the world, and naturally the reason these biographies were printed or published was that those people were prominent. I noticed that they all had a turning point in their lives when they kept away from the world and from people for a while and imposed hard conditions on themselves, and although the world never so much as rippled at these disappearances, in every case I've read, a different person came out of that room.

4. The story began when I too decided, a few times, to disappear. Each time, with some small change, a different person came out of that room, and this last time something different happened: I was the same person, and suddenly I came out of a different room. As if whoever worked the switches of these rooms had flipped the switch for my exit from the wrong room. Maybe it was even deliberate, but only with difficulty and much too late did I realize that that place didn't belong to me, or I to it. But well, I started living.

5. But all the while I also thought about the life I'd had before and wished I could carry it on, and well, I had left all my loved ones behind there too and missed them, and on the other hand, since I had no past in my new situation, I had no motivation to carry on with the new life either.

6. Now, in this new life, I had other emotional problems that belonged to someone else, and I had no choice but to live through them, while in my previous life I had left behind my own flesh and blood, but they no longer counted as my problem.

7. When someone or something doesn't count as your problem, but in the real world you feel responsible for it, or feel anything else about it, what you're doing is called interfering, or meddling.

8. Now you have a problem you have no feeling for, and a feeling that isn't your problem. You go to a psychiatrist and he doesn't know the name of your illness; that is, you are suffering from health.

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