Open. Closed. Locked. Unlocked.

My husband’s keys, in his hand, he says, don’t work. They neither lock or unlock the front or the back door, he says. Sometimes he cannot leave the house because he cannot lock the door behind him, he says.

It is true that the door which was replaced a long time ago has somewhat slipped in its frame. I don’t dispute that. Things don’t align as they once did.

My husband’s keys, in my hand, work. They lock and they unlock the front and the back door. Chances are, even if they didn’t, I would still leave the house by climbing out of the kitchen window. There is an old metal bin just under the window. I could push the window back in place. It wouldn’t be locked but no one would know to look at it.

It’s all about angles and lift – lifting the door up by the handle and with a not-quite 360 degree turn of the key everything slides into place. It locks. My own keys are not always so cooperative.

The spare keys, of which we have two sets, are hit and miss. I thought I had lost the spare keys somewhere and had another set made. The lost ones were found in the bottom of my knitting needle vase.

I have a habit, passed down from my mother no doubt, of unlocking doors in the morning. She had a fear of being locked in if the house was on fire. It never was, apart from the occasional chip pan fire in the kitchen, but she unlocked doors anyway. Of course, way back then, the village we lived in, people didn’t lock their doors anyway. We had nothing of value for a thief to take. Any thief might have felt inclined to leave something rather than remove anything.

Doors. Ours is a top-half glass in Celtic colours, bottom half PVC. There is a doorbell glued to the PVC which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

Doors. Open. Closed. Locked. Unlocked.

There are Facebook posts that do the rounds every so often about people, presumably friends, that are high maintenance. They are perhaps the selfish takers and drainers that do not add to our lives. Toxic people. And the Facebook post encourages us to get rid of them.

I am not one that collects Facebook friends. I am selective of who I make friends with, so I don’t really have any toxic ones. They are face to face friends, family and a whole host of fellow writers. A dozen or so like my posts and half a dozen may comment, but I don’t have reams of people. If someone annoys me, I shut the cyber door on them for 30 days. The door isn’t locked. It’s just shut.

I would like to think that my cyber door is open and there is a cyber kettle boiling and a cyber cup of tea being poured for someone that needs a listening ear. People are messy and friendships are not always the neatly made beds we would want them to be. So I suppose I have always been reluctant to cast people away. It is the subtext I think that bothers me that divides people into those that are worthwhile and those that apparently aren’t.

I thought I had avoided the toxic ones. It seems not.

How toxic? Bad Toxic. I realised that I did not like the person I was becoming when I was in their company. I didn’t really like the person they were becoming either.

Doors. Open. Closed. Locked. Unlocked.

I hate the idea of giving up on people or abandoning them. But I also hate the idea of being turned sour and losing my sense of cheerfulness and hope. I am not immune from the draining effect some people have. And I am surrounded by so many life-affirming friends that more than offset the negativity of my toxic one.

The door has been closed for now. It’s not locked. Not yet.