Sheena still remembers the feeling of disappointed when she clicked the garage door opener and the door did not go up.
It was not her garage door.
It was someone else’s in the subdivision. Someone she had never met but had enjoyed an intimate relationship with just the same, for the past six months or so.
She didn’t remember exactly what had made her hit her garage door opener so far away from her house to begin with; perhaps she was bored and curious about how far away it would work. Whatever made her click it, she noticed at that exact moment, her neighbor’s garage door opened.
She wrote it off as a coincidence but couldn’t help clicking it as she drove by the house the next morning.
It opened, revealing boxes, tools, and assorted gardening equipment. She wondered what was under the tarp in the corner.
She felt a shiver of delight pass through her.
When she thought about it, it just made sense. There are only a finite amount of frequencies between 300 MHz and 390 MHz, so there was going to be inevitable overlap in large neighborhoods such as hers.
But the odds of finding the perfect match…
Delightful.
Of course, she was careful not to click it every time she passed the house. They would catch on. Put two and two together.
She had to be discrete.
She wondered if the reason she enjoyed it was in any way connected to why she liked to walk over subway grates when she was wearing a dress. “That’s a question best left to fans of Marilyn Monroe,” she thought to herself. “Oh yeah, oh yeah.”
Whatever the reason, sometimes late at night, she would drive over to the house and open the garage door. Occasionally, she would see the house light come on; once, she almost drove off the road she was so delighted.
But those days were over now.
She thought about buying dozens of garage door openers in hopes of finding a new frequency, or finding a new door in the neighborhood that would open with her current clicker, but she didn’t.
“Not much use in trying to recapture something that is over and done with. For now at least.”
But she does miss it.
Some nights, she just drives past the house and wonders what was under the tarp.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Under this thin veneer of civilization we’re all savages. ”
--Richard Sherman The Seven Year Itch