Are We Not The Door?
There is a building in the Cobble Hill Historic District that was constructed in the mid 1800s. Still habitable, the apartment has housed countless New Yorkers. As a result of time, the building sags slightly in the center. In fact, if one were to place a marble against the far wall of one of the apartments, the marble would quickly roll to the front door as if looking to escape.
There is a bedroom door in the apartment that the landlord wished to replace. However, upon measuring it, he realized that most door manufacturers no longer make doors with those dimensions. He was able to special order it. Upon installation, he discovered that the door did not fit in the doorway. Due to gravity’s pulling over time, the sagging of the building had transformed the right angles of the rectangular doorway to resemble a parallelogram.
The landlord determined that he could make this door fit if he cut the top and the bottom at slight angles, transforming the door from a rectangle to a crude parallelogram. Above a bed of sawdust and elbow grease, the landlord finally installed the door. However, closing the door required one to shove it into the frame while simultaneously pulling the handle up. This created a tremendous stress on the door and fear that it might break whenever closed. The landlord didn't care.
The door remained there for five days as a brown, woodgrain door while its predecessor had been white, like all the other doors in the apartment. Eventually, the landlord painted it white.
It remained open for two weeks while the tenants were away on vacation. When they returned, they discovered that the task of closing the door was significantly more challenging than it had been previously. Additionally, opening the door required such force that one might think the user intended to make a desperate escape.
One of the tenants realized that the older doors were misshapen because the building was misshapen. The building had changed the shape of the doors because they were closed as gravity was pulling the center of the building to the ground. The tenant decided to close the door whenever possible, despite the excruciating inconvenience of it.
Before he went to sleep, he placed his hand on the handle and drove his shoulder into it. He fought the friction and heard the top left corner of the door scrape painfully against the frame. He pushed a little harder to ensure it was completely closed. When he woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, he grabbed the door handle and yanked it towards him, prying it free from the oppressive frame. He did this over and over again. Everytime he passed through the frame, even for the most minuscule task such as retrieving a pen from his bedroom, he had to make sure the door remained closed as often as possible.
A couple days into this new habit, the door became slightly easier to open and slightly easier to close. It will continue to get easier but it will never be perfect. And if this new habit is abandoned, the doorframe will simply change shape again and refuse to accept the door.
