A Secret Door

Most nights I can be found sitting by my window lost in the pages of a book. While usually immune to the happenings going on in the street below me, I sometimes find my concentration broken by the flickering on or off of the street light across my way.

In design and color it looks just like all the other lamp-posts who start their glowing nightly guard of Maine street in the early evening hours. But with this one there is a slight difference, it doesn't always stay lit. Once off it stays that way for sometime before once more coming to life. The most likely explanation for this is simply a faulty bit of wiring, something in the mechanics of the post itself that doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to. I however, have come up with another possibility, one that is much less likely, almost definitely impossible, yet infinitely better. Magic.

Growing up I, like millions, was charmed by the story of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The idea of being able to walk into a closet and out into a world so fantastically different from our own, is one I have hoped for ever since I first read those words. What stuck with me in that story, almost as much as the idea of getting into Narnia itself, was what Lucy first saw when she arrived. A lone black lamp-post shining among the snow and the trees. The random on and off of my own lamp-post has sparked in my mind the idea that it isn't just some innocuous piece of metal and electricity, but rather a symbol, a gate to enter some more magical world.

What is if is a sign, to those much more in the know than we, that a different dimension, another universe, is once more open to crossing over. What if the light turns off when the secret entrance is closed and turns back on once more when the magical key has been turned to unlock it's hidden door. Or it could be the opposite, the light turns off when one is about to cross over so that we don't see them disappear into nothing. What if all one had to do was know the exact right spot to look when that light turned back on in the deep hours of midnight, know the secret steps to take, the right way to knock. Just imagine the possibilities, think of all the different things one could see and discover if that one lamp-post was not at all what it appeared.