After the Ball is Over

Has it really been two weeks since I last posted? I've been so busy. For your reading pleasure I've divided the last two weeks into two posts. This, and the one that will come after it.

So, it's all over. My exams went off without a hitch, my room was packed into boxes and I took my last look at the familiar University of Olympus campus. I've read that your undergraduate campus never really becomes home because you know deep in your heart it's eventually going to come to an end; and so it does.

I think there is truth in that statement. The buildings and gardens of the University don't really feel like Home in the normal sense, not the "I return here" feeling of Home, the supremely comfortable feeling of Home, even if home is not comfortable. But I am attached to the University of Olympus and all it's nooks and crannies and uncomfortableness. I couldn't walk around it lightly, I can't leave it lightly without feeling a reflective sadness, a loss for not being in that place anymore.

The morning of my last day was red-ly sunny, like the best days in Olympus. To me, the red light makes the colours all the more brighter: the greens are greener, the blues are richer, the yellows are warmer. Everything is bathed in this light. I wandered around the campus, taking it all in, not just reliving it all but also creating for myself a last memory of the place.

Am I being overdramatic? Definitely. My family's house (my home?) is only an hour's journey away by car. While I'm in Olympus I can visit any time I like. It's not the geographical space that I am leaving... it's the leaving the University of Olympus behind in time; that's the loss. I may return to the campus many times in my life, but it will never be under the same temporal conditions.

Ha. Here I am trying to de-dramaticize my comments and I'm ending up far more dramatic than before.

I made sure I said goodbye to the university before one of my uncles from the House showed up to pack up my remaining stuff (much of it had already gone). Goodbyes to places are private things. They cannot occur in the rush of packing and conversation and checking to see if you've got everything that always accompanies a move out.

Left alone in my room for the last time, I wrote 'Teshi Was Here' on the wall in the closet, in tiny letters. Uninventive, I know, but I was in a rush and I couldn't think of anything else to write.

So I left my university and my education and my campus behind and went home. The Ball- a very old term for a public formal dance- is over; the dancing, as it were, is done.

Your Real Grown Up,

Teshi

The Door Museum

When I was a child growing up just outside Olympus, one of my favourite places to go was The Door Museum. For those of you who don't know, it's a quirky museum that contains only doors. But the best thing about it for us kids was that you didn't just look at the doors, you could go through them. You would move from room to room, reading the plaques or listening to a guided tour, choosing each door you would go through.

Today I decided, on a whim, to go back.

It's always a bit worrisome, visiting somewhere that you were enchanted by as a child. You wonder if it will be really as good as you remember, or whether it will be kitsch or childish, or you'll see through the illusion and the golden memory will be gone forever. Because of this, I went alone. I didn't really want anyone tagging along into my childhood memories.

The Door Museum isn't much to look at outside. It's inside an old factory that stands only just inside a respectable part of the city. One block east of the museum and things start getting shady. After lunch, I took the train there and walked from the station with a few families. When I saw the building, and I'm not exaggerating, I actually teared up. I hadn't remembered the entrance doors until I got there but the memory the sight triggered was very strong. There are five doors, all of a different kind: a rotating door, a motion-sensor door, a door from an old house on Earth, a round door with a knob right in the middle, and right in the middle a medieval portcullis that I remember was open on special occasions.

I froze before the doors with all the children, completely transported back to being three or four years old (that's six-eight in Earth years, roughly), spoilt for choice by these doors. I distinctly remember running in and out them all, my hands making smudges off the glass of the rotating door. There were children doing that today. For old time's sake, I went through all four doors, leaving the rotating door for last.

I bought my ticket and went through the huge beautifully carved stone door from Ancient Egypt (replica, naturally) into the hall of doors.

It really is how I remember. Real doors, replicas, fictional doors from stories modern and ancient, some more passages or arches than doors, sliding doors, trapdoors, vehicle doors, airlocks, and some that are not really ordinary doors at all- there's a backless wardrobe from some old tale. Each room is somewhat themed to the two, three, four or five doors that open onto it. One like a forest, another a space vessel, another from early Mars complete with peach sky above.

There's one room, buried deep in the middle, with only one door. The door itself is small and unassuming (I'm not going to tell you where; you will have to find it for yourself). I remembered it but it took me a while to find. You pull up the hatch and push the door and it opens with a hiss. You crawl through it and on the other side there is darkness. It's a huge spherical room, dotted with constellations and planets and the sun. You're standing on a glass grate above Mars, looking down at the turning planet as it is today, blue and orange and red.

I'm not sure if I am particularly tired today, or perhaps its the impending completion of my degree and thus two years of my life combined with the flood of childhood memories of that room, but standing in the darkness looking down at my planet with the globe of universe around me, it was pretty hard to swallow the lump in my throat. Perhaps I am simply over sentimental, heh.

Anyway, the Door Museum is an incredible place, and meant much more to me today as a grown-up. I wasn't the only adult exploring it- because that's what you do; explore it. In some ways, it's like a miniaturisation of the world. All the possible doors, all the possible options- and there are some doors that are difficult to find, or easy to pass by because they look so mundane. The only way not to enjoy it is to sit in the first room and not go anywhere.

Anyway, so I just (well, plus the time it took me to write this) got back. And it was as I remembered. And it was fabulous.

Your explorer,

Teshi