Doormat

Cillian Mullen

You found me at a Goodwill

Down the street from where your parents grew up

And a block away from where you said your first words

Tracing patterns of ancient footsteps down the aisles

You found me on the floor, and nearly stepped on me

But you didn’t

You picked me up, dusted me off

You read the words written across my body outloud, “rain or shine”

I watched the crinkles of your smile crease your face for the first time

I blame myself for not remembering the pattern better.

You took me home

Well, almost

You took me to the front door

Two lights made the porch glow a rich orange I had never seen before

I was entranced by the color and drawn to the warmth

How lucky was I to even be sitting at your front door?

Even if I would never be allowed inside, I thought

I would stay here forever

And so I did.

That summer came and went

You picked raspberries that grew in the bushes right in your front lawn

Grass clippings got stuck between my teeth when you trotted your way inside

Your bellowing laughter echoing to absolutely no one but me, nowhere but here

The sweet sticky honey you got from your next door neighbor dripped onto me

And every once in a while you’d look down at me and smile, reassuring me I was doing the right thing

Because I had to be

If I was here with you, I had to be doing the right thing.

Or I thought

The first thing I noticed was your boots began to get muddier

When you carelessly wiped them across my face as you sprinted into the house

It was rain season, so I shrugged it off

You just wanted to get out of the downpour and get warm again

I couldn’t fault you for wanting that for yourself

I would have wanted the same thing if I had been you

But I wasn’t, I was a doormat.

Then when the rain died down, the snow came

I watched children crowd the streets as they pushed massive chunks of ice and snow off of the street and into the lawn

I would see you call to them every once in a while

The pink on your cheeks making you as rosy as ever

You were bundled up and layered to the point I could barely see your face

But I still recognized you underneath it all

Somewhere inside there I knew something familiar, someone recognizable

You rushed inside every time you came by, though

So I didn’t see it for a long time.

Then the snow melted, eventually

No more children wandered the streets and into our front yard

You always seemed to be out of the house and never lingered at the front door anymore

The hot air came back in time and with it the raspberry bushes began to show signs of life again

Their thorns reaching out and prodding at the world around them

The berries slowly but surely becoming ripe and ready to be plucked

They came, and they went, without anyone ever stopping to suck on their sweet but bitter nectar

You weren’t around enough for them to matter to you anymore.

As the heat of summer months trudged onward, you eventually came back

With you, someone else

A flowery voice and a laugh that sounded like home

Glistening hair that matched with the honeysuckle color of your eyes

The both of you could have been on the reality TV shows I used to watch through your window

It made perfect and complete sense to me

And otherwise, at least I was still here

Allowed to linger at your doorway and wait for the chance to possibly be invited in

Even if it never happened, the thought that it could kept me right where I felt I needed to be

But one day

You came home

Hand in hand, and hand wrapped around the handles of a large plastic bag

You dropped both, and put them on me instead

Grasping me on either side

“I can’t believe you’ve had it this long,” a voice cooed

“I know,” your voice replied, “I just didn’t know what to do with it until now”

You lifted me off of the ground

I was carried in your hands, and put into a container with the lid slammed shut

In the distance I could hear your laughter trailing off

I could hear the sounds of a broom sweeping across the ground, inevitably where I had once been

I could hear a door open, and then shut again

I could watch all of it, without needing to see anything at all, disappear as the world fell silent again

A year being a doormat, ultimately wasted to serve someone that would have never been happy to come home to me.

Cillian Mullen, Environmental and Arctic Studies senior at University of Washington.

The literary work I do surrounds my experiences growing up queer in small-town midwest, specifically Geneva, Illinois. This specific piece connects to the experiences that I had with trying to be palatable, lovable, and encapsulate my experience as being trans in a way that was catered to the world I was surrounded by. The way that I constructed my identity as a teenager was done in a manner to create something that someone else might want, something that was desirable and worth while for someone else. Experiences I had with love that came along with this greatly impacted me; they left me feeling empty, used, and oftentimes like I was worth nothing because I had never made my identity about myself. Instead, I constantly made it about everyone else around me. Doormat seeks to metaphorically synthesize a specific encounter of falling in love with someone and waiting until I morphed into something perfect, something they needed, until eventually realizing that I never could have done that.