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The gate’s hinges don’t screech anymore. The gate doesn’t rattle, bouncing up and down with a bigger chance to fall each time rather than reaching its 180 degrees of comfortable openness. My Oma used to say that it had once been green like when she had freedom, but we’d squashed that in the same way that an invisible hand had one day taken it upon itself to paint the door gate black. Since we’d moved our boxes into the garage, her life was forced into a tumultuous relationship between what she wanted to do and what she could, she liked to repeat.
For example, the car. She believed in the ritual of sliding her white Golf through the garage gate backwards (the back of the car had more bruises than one could count), right until it knocked on the door to The Help’s dormitory. It was safe from outside hazards, there. Yet now, parked behind the front door gate and next to Opa’s Mazda, she wondered where her voice had failed to feel like a definite “no.” Nothing was ever to work the way she wanted to again. She’d been subject to a curse.
My father had a red and white Kawasaki at the time that he found me sitting on often, hyperaware with the prospect of possible adventure. When it was a yes, I ran through the gravel, unlocked the hatch, then pulled the gate with my ankles deep in the ground until it bulged and sang its little screeching melody once more. Welcome to the outside, it seemed to say.
At 6 years of age I knew how to fit my helmet around my head better than I ever knew how to fit a dress around a Barbie. Stiffening my body, almost uncontained emotion, fingers crossed as I thought of my father leaving before I had time to get on. “Foot on the exhaust,” then, and off we went.
I felt a piece of that front door gate, like it wouldn’t make sense without a child’s fiddly fingers, my pushes and pulls. An integral piece of the fortress ahead, the end of a dead-end street. The mews made for the perfect trail to skateboard on in spring and summer, and for a bed of brown pine needles crunching beneath my feet when the weather started to fall. Especially in winter, the street was littered in pinecone produce, and I rubbed my thumb against each of its sturdy wooden petals to ensure the squirrels had not wasted one single nut.
“Crumble bread, the dog, the dog!” my mother once shouted, running and stumbling towards the gate. The beast was already turning a corner when we realised what the matter was – me immersed in the intricacies of cutting samples of Aloe Vera for my potions as I was – but we all knew what to do. Lie on the floor before the gate, and the dog trots back to you as if it never wanted to leave. The beauty of a sweet Labrador such as ours.
The door gate can’t be climbed anymore, unfit for the dreams of a twelve year old who wants to sit together with the sunset, trying to spot the peaks of the skyscrapers in pink, the twinkle of Manhattan’s blinding lights in the night from a little town in Spain. It can’t be leaned on, it can’t be slammed in anguish, it doesn’t allow for adolescent threats of leaving home anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore, for it is dead. Replaced with a different thing, the story of a different time made by different people. Only the image, the moving image of the angular life of that front gate, I like to keep.