It’s been gone now for about fifteen years, but there used to be a door at the top of a set of three concrete stairs to a little stoop traced on two and a half sides with black painted twisted wrought iron rails at the edges. On either side of the door sat a chair of similar black wrought iron. The door was chalky white, faded, stained, scuffed, with a brass vertical door grip handle and thumb button. The door could only be opened by touching a valid student ID to the card reader attached to the wall next to the handle. Windows lined either side of the door, and a yellow light shone behind milky plastic lampshade hanging above.
I press the button and pull the door to a luscious green grass and brilliant blue sky. The air is cool inside, but the sunshine is warm. Down the mountain below I see the sea stretching out, cobalt, steel, twisting lava floes frozen for a million years dancing with coral reefs in the shallows- life clings on to the most desperate and hard forged bits of the surface of our pale blue dot. Kites fly overhead and the wind blows in my hair. To my right, my wife is smiling. We sat here once and meditated while people came and went and took pictures. The hike up the mountain in the hot sun was miserable compared to diving in the water below and chasing fish through the natural arcs in the rock.
Tonight, we’ll climb up one of the staircases in the dorm behind the door. The rooms are hardly air conditioned, and the constant Alabama humidity has left every wall slick, and the neighbors are smoking and loudly making love on just the other side.
We join them here, the window open to the street below, bustling with the night market, revelers, food stalls, fruit, and women braiding hair. Tomorrow we will meet friends for a morning run, eat breakfast, and spend the rest of the day in the water. Behind this door, this door, with the floppy robber suction cup penis that bounces when you swing it open, this door that trapped my little puppy, now an old girl, still walking with a limp from the broken hip.
This door opens to a paradise that was only attainable by a three hour boat ride, dramamine and headphones, time and space now folded, a decade or more, and an entire planet, this portal connects two and the two sets of people and experiences. Behind this door were the little bits and bobs and situations and things said late at night that drove me so crazy, the boundary conditions that determined my wave form. Behind this dorm, where once on a cold night we sat smoking in front of the empty building before making love, behind this doors the set of eyes that I filter the whole world through.
This damn door and the windows above it, and the spaces behind the windows and the car park and the desert between me and you and the desert between your lips. That piercing in your face and the one night I did something you didn’t like, and offered you a present and you ran away from me, and the five days we spent in the hospital before the baby was born and all those people that we go up and down the mountain with, the kids I played cards with in Chinese after walking around the street with that moron from my old job, the time we fucked up the radio telescope and painted the staircase rainbow and those coyotes I saw in the morning prowling under the scrubs near the observatory. All of that, every last drop, behind this fucking door. Boardgames and DND and rock and roll, heroin in my bedroom, crack cocaine in your veins with your scary eyes, being drunk and belligerent, all my dead friends, all my living friends, all the rules of society that I know now, all of it just waiting behind that door, and here you sit, across the street under a lamppost smoking cigarettes while young sociopaths drone on about how rich their dads are, watching silhouettes dancing in furry masks in front of the door.
Stuff Cam Wrote 