Every house has a front door and a back door. For some houses, these may be interchangeable. Perhaps the kitchen entrance is really the front door for some; a place for the inhabitants of the house to traipse in and out while avoiding the prying eyes of neighbours.

In a house of this sort, the front door is perhaps a little forlorn, unused except for the odd social fortnight or so. This door may be almost obscenely ornate, with carvings of love and conquest across the ages, but this doesn’t make it popular. Perhaps for other inhabitants of this house, they prefer a far more romantic entrance, accessed via an overgrown courtyard nestled within the embrace of stone and teakwood. This courtyard is sprawling and has disqualified itself from being a proper courtyard, for it breaks out through one of the many sides of an ancient wing that has long crumbled into the ground, allowing one a view of the ocean and the vertiginous slope of the hill upon which this domus was built as it slants towards one of the three great forests of Yraveri.

In such a courtyard, perhaps you might even glimpse magical hybrid creatures that have escaped from the Far East.

My front door is nestled in uneasy obscurity against one of the least perceptible angles of this house with so many sides, it can’t even be said to be geometric. I access it from the steps carved onto the side of the hill onto a curved pathway. The door is hidden by huge, overgrown bushes and an unruly trio of frangipani trees. It is a slim, rectangular slit breaking into the rough stone facade of the side of Domus Exsulis that faces Alta Exsilii, the Sea of Exiles. It is a slit that is perhaps too slender for more corporeal forms, or is it? Unnoticed, I allow the breeze to dry the saltwater off my shivering body. Perhaps I will even climb one of these trees, unwilling to encase myself within the walls of the house, yearning to return to the Sea of Exiles.

Every house has an obvious front door, but some of us prefer the ones that are less ornate, far more hidden. It makes for quick entries and exits. Some doors are bigger than they seem.

It allows us to escape notice. And it keeps you out.