The Third Item

When Su Jin was twenty-three years old, she took the initiative to walk through a black door. The door closed behind her, and she wore three clothes and stayed in a room without day or night for one thousand and ninety-five days. She wrote a line on the wall: "Twenty-seventh night. I decided not to leave." Three years later, a psychotherapist named Lin Mo opened the door in his dream. He did not enter the room, but stood in the doorframe—one foot inside, one foot outside. Standing all night. Later he went to the ginkgo forest in Spring Creek Town and dug out a tin box under the third tree. There was a photo, a letter, and a gray cuff that had been hand-sewn in the box. There are two rows of dark blue stitches on the inside of the cuffs, and the end of the pen is slightly raised, like a person who wrote the words "The door is unlocked" and traced the last stroke twice. "The Door is Unlocked" is a story about "entering" and "passing by". Entering into other people's pain, walking through your own past, and finally emerging from a door that no longer needs to be pushed open because it is always open. When you know the door is open, you no longer need to push it. You can walk through it, pass by it, or sit at the door and watch the sunset for a while.