Open/Closed — Closed/Open, by Barbara Cartwright

Open or closed? Closed or open?

When I’m driving, I like the doors to be closed but the windows open, my right hand on the wheel, my left arm resting on the window’s sill, half in, half out, in case I want to imitate a dolphin, rising up and diving down in imaginary waves, an imaginary sea, just currents of air really. I switch things up and take the wheel to get something from my purse — lodged between the driver’s and the passenger’s seats — open, unzipped, but closed off enough I have to feel for what I want. Driving along at sixty-miles per hour, my mind is open, playing ping pong with possibilities — though it craves the safety of closed, closed off, when I have too much to do, too many things to mix and match. I can actually sense information flying out of a hole in my head drilled wide, made deep, by anxiety and a lack of time. An opening I must close as soon as possible lest I become a flibbertigibbet — with a driver’s license.

Closed or open? Open or closed?

Flowers start off closed up tight tight tight until the sun’s light, the ever warming air, spring’s nourishing rains coax clenched blooms — held tight by what, I wonder — into a state of open vulnerability. Beautiful but short-lived. Because that kind of tenderness, nature’s tenderness, can’t last. Hour by hour, day by day, that state of perfect openness overreaches itself, stretching past any point of sustainability. Some flowers hang on, as their blooms dry out, and remind us daily of their former glory. While others collapse into piles and heaps, clinging to any surface that will have them, if only for a little while, before they decompose and disappear from view.

Open, closed. Closed, open.

There’s no guarantee. No perfect state of bliss. Just the journey from one state to another and sometimes back again.