The door of our apartment here at Los Baños consists of two doors. The first door from the outside is made of tin, a silver metal that doesn’t seem to rust. Perhaps it’s stainless steel or aluminum. Half of it is made of screen so I could see what’s outside without completely opening it.
Whenever I wake up in the morning, I open the second part of our door—the wooden door—so light could come in through the metal door. I also move the curtains on the window beside the door to let more light come in. Our house is poorly lit that my room is only the place where consistent sunlight is available in the day. The steel door has a stopper so I could keep it open when moving large objects in or out. I’m not sure but I think there’s a small vertical hole in the middle of this door.
The second door, as I said, is wooden. It’s a thick wooden door with two locks. The first lock is on the knob itself, but the knob even when locked could still be opened through an ID or any thin hard object slide on the edge of the door. And so, whenever we leave, especially when it involves a few days or hours, we double lock the door through its second ?.
I remember that I lived in two other houses with a similar door. The first house was the house in Pangasinan, particularly the door that separates the kitchen and the living room. Why we ? that kind of door downstairs, I still don’t know. I do remember locking my siblings in the kitchen with the second door, so I could still see them from the other side. That door eventually got destroyed and I think we had to renew all of it so what only remains now (if it isn’t still eaten by termites) is that thick door.
The other house I lived in with this similar double door system is the apartment my sister and I lived in while I was in third year and she was in her first year. That too had a screen door and a wooden door although I’m not very familiar about the feeling of that door. I lived there for only a few months, not even a year I think. I once wrote about that door when I was writing about that fateful day that separated me from my new life. That door led me to my call with a British mentor the other day, who is here to help me express my spirituality and religiosity in the way that feels right to me.
The door in Pangasinan exemplifies everything that was weird about my life there, “out of place.” The door in Baguio is fading away from memory. And this new door here in LB is no more than a reminder of those two doors in Pangasinan and Baguio and all the other doors I’ve taken and entered for the past decade. It also reminds me that I always have a choice—a choice to stay or to leave, to hide behind doors and feel at home or walk away from them when what they protect no longer resonates with me. While writing this, it also downed on me: perhaps, I too am a door, my words and actions, depending on how I bring them forth into the world, could be a way for others to finally leave a place too painful to stay in or enter what feels a lot more like home.