[RF] A Tale of Two Doors

In my junior year summer, I lived a thousand miles away from home, and the only thing protecting me from the perils of a strange city was a rod-shaped bolt fastening my door. With it shut, I felt like I was no longer a stranger in a strange land. In addition to providing me with a peaceful slumber, it ignited newfound freedom within me. The freedom to be whatever I can without the fear of ridicule.

So naturally, when I returned back to my dorm I carried this freedom with me. Only to realize that my room lacked one. I had a faulty door that wouldn’t lock. And to my dismay, my room was on the side of the corridor that was often busy with people passing by. On my first night, I felt an equal mix of fear that someone might barge in, excitement at being back in college, and optimism that it would get repaired the next day. However as the days passed, fear started occupying a lion's share. The maintenance department continued what it was best at, slacking off at repairing it and my optimism grew narrower day by day. After all, how could it not?

I tried playing creative, setting up booby traps, and obstructing the way to my bed because God forbid who might come in when. I used the extra table in my room to block the entrance from the inside. But after a week, it seemed like a lot of work. The table was too heavy and I had to mess up my entire room to shift it near the door. I tried tying knots with a slinky pattern only I could open. But at 3 am one night when I had to step out to pee, untangling the knot seemed like a gargantuan task for a half-asleep me. I ended up cutting the slinky, only to never tie it again.

I would lay on my bed, looking through the window at the building in front of me wondering how peacefully students over there slept. How they didn’t have to worry about the external intrusion. How they could do whatever they had in their mind without the fear of their solitude being hampered. And lay I did, pondering how funny the whole idea of freedom is. That someone with open doors feels trapped and someone with closed doors feels open.

The idea of exercising my freedom started seeming repugnant to me. As someone who would shy away from expressing himself in the purview of the public, this summer I self-taught myself how to salsa. I thoroughly enjoyed my online Zumba sessions where all I had to do was plug my earphones in and break a sweat. I relished all the times I would stand in front of a mirror and play my favorite scenes from Taxi Driver. But I couldn’t do any of it now. Not with a room with doors wide open.

While the door to my room couldn’t be shut from the inside, it could be from the outside. So when all of my efforts went in vain, I asked my neighbor to lock me inside. He would lock the door and slide the key down through the gap between the door and the floor. I was adamant about doing this and one night I gathered everything I could need. A couple packets of chips, a few bottles of water, and medicines. I ate light that night to avoid going to the washroom. I was all set.

I went to my neighbor’s and handed him my key. I explained to him the procedure and why I wished to do it. And minutes before execution he chickened out. He tried elucidating how stupid of an idea it was. And how stupid of a person I was being stupid. I begged him to do it. But he refused to. He told me that he’d accompany me tomorrow and we’ll take the matter to the authorities and resolve the issue and put this lack of responsibility from the maintenance department to an end. He calmed me down stating that he is there next door and he was one call away if something happens. But the idea of locking someone from outside was something he couldn’t digest. So he sent me back to my room and asked me to calm down.

I returned back to my room. And lay I did, wondering how I was supposed to protect myself from the enemies outside?

Eventually, I dozed off. I woke up 8 hours later to see the corridor of the building next to me, the one I could see from my window, flocked with people. To uncover why there has been an unusual rush that morning, I climbed down to the ground floor. A friend told me that something terrible happened last night.

A locked door didn't open for two days and when it finally did, the occupant wasn't basking in the sun. He was a boy of twenty and one and one dreadful night two nights back, he decided to stay twenty and one forever.

And while I stood there absorbing the gravity of the news, the crowd of students rushed past me and I became a part of that rush. It was a heavy day that day. And at night when we finally returned home, I started running down every piece of information about the kid I got. I started matching it with every piece of information about myself I knew.

And this got me thinking.

While a faulty door sucks at protecting you from the forces of the outside, it's pretty damn good at helping others protect you from the forces of the inside.

And that's when it hit me. Every time I needed someone's presence and was too “tired” to ask, anyone could just come in and sit for a while, joke, whine, or vent. And as for the people around, they knew there was a door they didn't have to knock on.

And as far as my freedom was concerned, I realized that it wasn’t just about opening doors, it was about being able to choose what doors you want to keep open and your state of mind when choosing whether you want to stay or leave.

After a few days, the tower bolt was repaired. Three and a half months after the first complaint. The head of the maintenance department personally apologized to me for the delay. It was the moment I had been waiting for an entire semester. I could finally close my door. But that night I kept it open. And the night after. And every night until I finally closed it when I left my college.