Empty doors II

There is a tiny fissure in this finger. Do you see it? Skin has grown
around it to protect the inner cells, but the fissure is still visible to a trained
eye. It goes straight through the finger, through skin and flesh and bone and
blood, clean to the other side of the world.
If she had known that she possessed such a window, perhaps her life
would have ended differently.
We have seen very few of these embodied rifts that sift reality, and
they are always in the most unexpected places. The fissure is in fact
congenital, a birth defect, if you may. It is certainly a mistakethese
fissures are proof of the inherent imperfection of the ways that nature
covers that which lies beneath it and above.
It never impaired her health, although it surely filled her nights with
endless dreams of strangers faces, her days with an unbearable sense of
(almost) hearing voices, (not quite) seeing things
Now, the missing heartbeats were much more serious. They became
chronic in her mid-twenties, something to do with a walled hermit The
hermit, or so the story goes, refused to bless her with a heartfelt word.
Often she would lay, in absolute silence, close to him but alone, unable to
scale the great wall that enveloped his heart in silence and despair. Her
heart developed a slight condition of beat-skipping as she stilled it to a
halt, agonizing to catch one. Of. His. Heartbeats.
And this became a habit of hersor rather, of her heart. Upon reaching
her thirties her heart was hardly beating at all. And again, what must seem
like a biomedical aberration is to me but a lovely display of human
accomplishment, for even with this condition she persisted, despite the
slowdown of her blood to a trickle amidst the heart which seldom beat at
all... (if only she had known to use the fissure in her finger to penetrate all
walls that hide the hearts of men)
 And yet none of these marvelsthe unexplainable fissure or the
miraculous heartmade her a special case. Here is what finally brought her
to us: an empty door. Ah yes, the eternal dilemma, the unsolvable puzzle,
the debate which shall remain a mystery to all, the perplexing enigma, the
empty door.