There’s a scene that exists in my mind like a memory, except that it isn’t one. It’s not that it couldn’t be, it’s just that it isn’t.

The setting for this scene is a kitchen. It’s an ordinary, unremarkable kitchen that doesn’t specifically exist. It’s exactly what you’d imagine if you pictured the kitchen of a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom house built in 1998 in a neighborhood where every house looks the same, except that some of them are the mirror image of each other.

It’s not a very big kitchen. On the left is a refrigerator with a few magnets and papers stuck to the front. It’s not one of those stainless steel refrigerators with a crushed ice dispenser you might use if you wanted your cream soda to feel fancy; it’s the kind made of white metal that looks like tissue paper someone crumpled up and flattened out again. The wood cabinets are the color of honey, and the countertop is speckled beige laminate. A black Mr. Coffee maker is tucked into the corner beneath the cabinet where the coffee mugs are kept. Next to the refrigerator is a neat stack of papers and a few random items that never seem important enough to put away.

Over the sink is a window that looks out on the driveway, which runs along the side of the house. Hardly anyone’s driveway runs along the side of the house in real life, but in this scene it does. On the far right side of the kitchen is a door. It’s not the front door, but it’s the door that everyone in the house uses to come and go. Even friends know to use this door, and they know they don’t have to knock. The door has a window with powder blue curtains that are always pulled back, and the window above the sink has a powder blue valence to match. In the center of the kitchen is an island, and this island is the focus of the scene.

This scene takes place in October. Maybe it’s the Thursday before Halloween. The important part for the feeling of this scene is that it’s not a weekend day. It’s dark outside, maybe 6 o’clock or so in the evening, and everyone who lives in the house is just getting home.

Someone is setting plastic grocery bags on the kitchen island, and a couple of kids are crowding around to see what’s inside. Inside the bags are pumpkins, which were quickly chosen from the pile of pumpkins displayed in front of the grocery store. Even though it’s almost Halloween, there were still plenty to choose from.

There’s a candle burning just to the left of the Mr. Coffee maker. It’s supposed to smell like cinnamon, but it mostly smells like burnt cotton and melted paraffin wax. There’s a pizza on the way for dinner, and sugar cookies are baking in the oven. No one had to fuss over the sugar cookies because they’re the “ready to bake” kind that have seasonal designs printed right on the dough.

In this scene, the people in the house don’t actually start carving the pumpkins. It’s just that moment right before. When they’re taking the pumpkins out of the bags. When the warmth of the kitchen is the perfect contrast to the crisp outside air that blows in when the pizza arrives. When they’re deciding what kind of faces they’re going to carve and whether or not they’re going to roast the pumpkin seeds. When they’re eagerly anticipating eating three pieces of pepperoni pizza and two still-warm sugar cookies and a can of soda each. When no one is thinking about the pile of papers on the counter or the expired coupons tacked to the fridge or the cold coffee in the Mr. Coffee maker that needs to be dumped out.

This scene isn’t a memory, but it lives in my brain like one. I have plenty of memories of the kitchen of my childhood home, memories of perfect October nights, memories of pumpkin carving and sugar cookies and pepperoni pizza, memories of the way a candle smells after you blow it out, and memories of coming home to the people I love at the end of the day. But this scene isn’t any of those memories, nor is it a compilation of them.

This scene is a feeling that never lasts long enough. It’s the feeling of warmth from the inside, of taking a deep breath, of being fully connected to something, of everything being at just the right brightness and just the right volume, and of every detail fitting together.

This feeling is the guardrail I grope for when I find myself teetering on the edge of the cavern between how life is and the way I wish it could be. When loneliness and discouragement feel like terminal illnesses or when time seems to be somehow moving too fast and going on for too long at the same time.

When a door has been left open in my mind, allowing too many things to come in at once, I sometimes step through that door and close it behind me. And for a few moments, I find myself on the other side of that door, and inside the feeling of this October kitchen.