Contact is at once a fleeting pleasure and a lingering threat.
To some, it is merely a metaphor, to others, the only truth in a world of shadows.
And yet, most move through life blind to what a touch demands.
Witches, sorcerers, those who claim to weave through the unseen —
we dismiss them as fiction, as residue of a darker age.
But look closer.
Look at those who approach your threshold.
Can you truly discern the difference between malice and mercy —
or have you, too, learned to see without perceiving?
There are doors that do not open — not because they are locked, but because something in us refuses the threshold.
We have learned to stand before open doors as if crossing them would cost us something irretrievable.
The door is rarely the problem.
It is the human hand that hesitates.
Once, doors were meant to be crossed.
Now, they are observed, measured, and quietly avoided.
There was a time when what could not be understood was named a threat —
not because it was dangerous,
but because it required a crossing no one was willing to make.
In 1685, in Exeter, a woman named Alice Molland was executed for witchcraft.
Not because her deeds were proven, but because something in her refused to fit the limits of what others could name.
She was not alone.
Before her, others had already been accused, terrified, and forced into a language that did not belong to them —
until they turned on one another.
Fear does not always isolate.
Sometimes, it creates a false form of contact —
one that binds people together not through understanding,
but through shared panic.
We built our societies upon these pyres.
We learned that to label a soul was to contain it —
and to contain it was to remain safe behind our own bolted doors.
We traded the threat of the unknown
for the security of the cage.
We began to prefer the shadow of a person
over the substance of their spirit —
for shadows do not require us to open our hearts.
The threshold was there.
It always is.
The moment where something unfamiliar asks to be met —
not judged, not reshaped, but simply recognised.
And yet, again and again, it was refused.
It was easier to accuse than to understand.
Easier to reduce a human being to a threat
than to risk the uncertainty of contact.
We like to believe we have moved beyond such things.
That we no longer name what we cannot understand as danger.
But the form has only changed.
Every threshold is a mirror.
And most of us avoid looking —
even when we know exactly what is there.