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Ajar

  1. On black: a light bulb bursts with a "SMASH!" and its glass scatters on the floor. A man in a shirt and tie hangs his head, then sits alone on the floor in the dark, a strip of light falling from a door across from him.
  2. A glowing door marked "Authorized Personnel Only". Caption: "I was an imaginative child." Rain on a car window, where a small hand presses against the glass. "'Imaginative' was her word for it." A toddler in a car seat reaches for the rainy window; in the rear-view mirror his mother smiles back at him. "Others wouldn't be nearly as kind..."
  3. Four panels of people judging him, each labelled: a teacher at her desk, "Distracted"; a man with a moustache in an office, "Inconsistent"; a pigtailed girl in a playground, "Annoying"; a priest holding a rosary, "Cursed". Then a crouching figure, and his mother smiling down in a store aisle: "But to my mother, I was endlessly creative."
  4. A map of a grocery store from above, a dotted trail weaving through the aisles past red apple signs, the apples more and more eaten. "'As long as I can remember,' she'd say to me, 'you'd experiment.' 'You would sit there thinking and without warning...'" A cashier points while his mother stands at the register: "'...you'd ruin everything...'" A trail of red apple peel leads to the boy in a shopping cart, mouth full of apple, his mother smiling: "'...so neatly.'"
  5. A kitchen strip: the boy as a toddler, then a little older, then a teen, while his mother cooks. "Time just moved too quickly for me." A red alarm clock reads 6:59. "I learned, with time, that my mother was right about everything." He sleeps on a pillow. "I learned to cope." The clock reads 7:00. "I lived by the clock." He lies awake, eyes open.
  6. A teen in silhouette reaches for a door, framed by scenes from his day, each with a red clock: waving goodbye to his mother, eating cereal at 7:35, watching TV at 7:45, turning the doorknob at 8:00, walking out at 8:01. "My routine became ritual and the clock became my God." "Every day, the same schedule. The same routine." "Day in, day out." "No time to yourself to wander."
  7. His tired eyes, close up: "And yet..." The teen walks home down a tree-lined street with a backpack. "I would still find time." A hand-drawn map of his route from home to school, dotted with stops. "The walks to and from school were my pause." "They were where the clock couldn't catch me." "It was liberating."
  8. Daydreams in thought clouds: the boy digging at a site in a pith helmet, "One day, maybe I'd be an archaeologist, studying ancient relics, decoding a forgotten world." Lecturing from a podium in round glasses, "Another day, I'd be a professor. I was lording over a lecture hall, the expert in my field." His wide-eyed face before the glowing "Authorized Personnel" door: "Perhaps I was a brilliant scientist who, after creating time travel, explored the past."
  9. The teen walks down a school hallway under a "Go Spartans" banner, his long shadow stretching back. "Imagine, I thought. Getting a visit from your future self." Below, on black, the "Authorized Personnel Only" door stands open, light spilling out. "From that day forward, I'd always be on the lookout for 'me'."
  10. A grown man in a shirt and tie stands alone on a scribbled, overgrown suburban street. "I never thought it all the way through." Below, the teen and the man face each other on either side of a black strip; between them a wristwatch reads 2:20 in red.
  11. Outside a school, the teen smiles while classmates chat nearby. "As a child, every day seems drastically important." Three strips of the walk home, the man in the tie watching from the distance while the boy dreams of castles, a graveyard and a sailing ship. "So when would you come back to, if you could really time travel?"
  12. Ink on paper. The boy stops on the sidewalk, startled. "How could you possibly choose a day? You'd probably already have a date in mind." Over the man's shoulder, the boy stands across the street from him. "You'd want to see something." A car parked in a driveway; the boy, a question mark over his head, looks at a house. "Something you didn't have anymore."
  13. The boy's frightened face over a wall of repeating words: "wake up shower say goodbye to mom make breakfast watch tv lock the door leave for school", ending in "LOCKTHEDOOR" over and over. In the middle, the front door of house 23, left ajar. "Something you miss." Below, his mother walks away with a shopping cart in the produce aisle while the boy sits on the floor, head in his hands, an apple rolling away.
  14. Three doors marked 23 on black, stepping down the page, each opening a little wider, letting more white light through.
  15. A dark silhouette of a man stands in a bright open doorway, one hand on the door. "Mom?"

Written by Alex Jarvis. Drawn by Amanda Rago.