Sinners: What Would Make You Open the Door?

“What would get you to open that door and let them inside?”

Content Notes

Grief, death of a loved one, cancer, hospitals, end-of-life decisions, chronic illness, disability, vampires as metaphor.

Welcome back to the Cryptid’s Den.

Come in.
You can set things down here.

This is The Crippled Cryptid.
A quiet corner of the internet where disabled lives are allowed to be complicated, unpretty, and still deeply loved.

I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid. Accidental cyborg.
Someone who lives in a body with opinions and a service dog named Luna who enforces rest with alarming efficiency.

Luna is part guardian, part shadow, part “hey, you don’t get to ignore that.”

M&M is my constant. My best friend. The one who holds the world steady when I can’t. Even if we don’t share the same views on vampires as metaphors today.

This space exists for the days when survival is the whole task.
For love that shows up even when everything hurts.
For telling the truth without turning it into a performance.

If you’ve been here before, I’m glad you came back.
If this is your first time, you’re welcome here.

The Lunatic Café is open.

On today’s menu: Sinners.
And one question that refuses to leave me alone.

Would you open the door?

As you know from Sunday’s post, I recently watched Sinners with M&M.
While we were watching, she said there was nothing the vampires could say that would make her open that door.

I told her I wasn’t so sure.

Since then, Sinners has been haunting my heart and my FYP. I posted my in-depth review on Sunday. And it doesn’t help that “Last Time (I Seen the Sun)” has been on repeat on Spotify ever since.

So, the question keeps circling back.

What would it take for you to open that door?

No pain?
Never being alone?
Forever with the people you love?

What would Remmick have to say to make you say yes?
To invite them in.
To step outside.

Would you do it willingly?
Or would you hold fast to the belief that someone is waiting on the other side- no matter what you believe in- someone you want to see so badly that eternity just isn’t worth the cost?

The same way Annie made her man promise he would kill her before he let her turn. But Smoke knew how important it was to Annie to see their baby in the afterlife- so I can’t blame Annie for her choice. I’m putting that one out there right now.

I don’t know if there’s a life without pain out there for me.

I tell you all the time I’m chronic illness alphabet soup so a life without pain sounds oddly suspicious.
And I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason to go all by itself.

But I do know this:

If I heard my grandfather’s voice on the other side of that door,
I might open it.

I might go.

When I was little, my grandparents adopted me.
My mother was young- too young- and they decided I would be better off with them. We all lived together, but they could offer stability. Better schools. Health insurance. Safety.

That’s a longer story, for another day. Maybe the day we talk about my Ancestry DNA test journey. It’s coming, don’t worry.

What matters here is this:

My grandfather was my best friend.

Like me, and my mother, he was chronically ill and disabled. I help take care of him. I knew how he liked his coffee, and the shows he liked to watch in the morning.

He was the one I could talk to about anything.
When I was being bullied, he handled it- because teachers didn’t listen to me. But he had the kind of presence that would fill up a room and refused to be ignored.
He talked to parents.
He made teachers do their jobs.
Bus drivers too.
Especially bus drivers. Which is how I suspect I wound up seated with M&M all those years ago.

He taught me how to drive a tractor when I was seven.
He taught me how to fish- something I don’t actually like, but it was his favorite thing. So, I never once complained.

That’s why we still have his fishing trophies, and some of his poles.
Why we still have that little mailbox in the back room that says his name and “Gone Fishing.”
Where you can leave notes.

Sometimes, when I miss him, I still leave notes. Hopes. Wishes.

If Heaven, or wherever comes next has a mail system, I hope he gets them.

On June 13, 2005, he was taken by cancer.

I never got to say goodbye.

I remember my mom and grandma coming home with the teddy bear I had brought him in the hospital.
I remember asking, “Is Papa home?”

They had promised not to bring it back until he was.

That’s how I found out they had taken him off life support. Something I didn’t really understand at 9-years old.

There is nothing I wouldn’t give for one more day.
Five more minutes.

Just to tell him I’m okay.
To let him know I’m still here.
Still fighting.
Still doing my best.

I respect Sammie for never putting the music down.
I respect him for saying no in the end.

After a lifetime that stretched from slavery to war to vampires in the world, I think even I would say no at that point. He’d just seen too much of the world to want to stay.

But if it were my grandfather on the other side of that door?

I would get up.
And I would go.

Because he was taken too soon.

So, when M&M says there’s nothing and no one who could make her open that door, I believe her.
I respect that kind of certainty.

I just don’t share it.

And I’m willing to admit that.

There’s something else Sinners keeps circling back to, something I haven’t been able to shake.

Remmick didn’t believe Sammie could save him.
He believed Sammie could help him see his kin.

Not through blood.
Not through turning.

Through music.

He believed music could do what immortality couldn’t.
That it could reach backward.
That it could thin the veil just enough for the dead to brush the living without demanding anything in return.

He wasn’t asking Sammie to open the door and leave this world.
He was asking him to stand close enough that the door might breathe.

And Sammie understood the cost of that.
He understood that being a bridge can still take everything from you.
That even if you never step through the door, standing in the doorway long enough can hollow you out.

That’s why his refusal matters.
Not because it was easy.
But because it was survival.

And maybe that’s why the music hasn’t let me go.

Because music already does what Remmick hoped Sammie could do.
It brings the dead close without asking me to follow them.

Last Time (I Seen the Sun).
Drag Path.

They aren’t background noise.
They’re memory made audible.
They’re a hand on my shoulder that doesn’t pull.

They let me hear my grandfather without asking me to leave the life I’m still fighting for.
They let me stand at the threshold without stepping through.

Maybe that’s the difference.

I don’t want eternity.
I don’t want to be turned.

I just want five minutes.
One voice.
One reminder that love doesn’t end where the body does.

If today was heavy, you didn’t carry it alone.
If today was quiet, I hope it stayed gentle.
If you’re here, you belong here.

Love you. Now say it back.

-Sky

© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability, honesty, and a little chaos.

(And a little dog fur.)

🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa

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