There was many an entrance.
Doors opened into abandoned buildings, churches, musky bars, and country clubs where she didn’t belong, into houses full of memories and loneliness manifesting as dust on the lips of picture frame people. This girl entered many places this year she had not before—or, at least, had never entered alone. She wore the mask of an adult for the first time; it felt good—it felt like high heels and flattery, wet moonlight and mystery. Now the mask is part of her face. It was never a lie; just a trick at first. Training wheels, for the birthday-cake part of her that has now exited. This year.
Exits.
In the end of Gone with the Wind, the anti-heroine cries out that “Tomorrow is always another day”, facing the enigmatic opacity of the mist. The hulking shapeless mass of the future; forever a comrade, forever a second chance.
Except when it isn’t.
Now, the last exit. The perishing of a year and a friend. This was his last year, his last show, and when time came to pull back his tubes like the curtain he bowed to his faithful audience and sneaked out a back exit. His chair is empty now, where he used to starve watching Law and Order and in better days, drink chilled margaritas and lift the metal tips of his cowboy boots on to the slate table. The table holds flowers and the feet of friends in rubber boots, congregating to face the misty future of a year without him. His son’s Buzz Lightyear slippers on the front stoop, his bedroom door closed: his son who now wears the mask.