Not Sure (Doors)
Everywhere you live, work, or just find yourself at regularly, there are unnoticed doors that you’ll probably ignore if you’re caught in a routine. They’re nasty metaphors for missed opportunities because of your lack of curiousity, but I digress. This is about a literal door.
In the past two years I’ve seen a lot of stupidity and unrefined morals in Cambodia. I’ve been working at this primary school in the dusty Phnom Penh suburbs for a while, teaching English (and some basic critical thinking, on the side) to little monsters and angels. Sometimes I ‘wake up’ and realise i’m wasting time in this random place. Life seems like a dream i can’t wake up from, and whenever i realise this, I follow impulses to keep myself awake a little bit longer.
Not long ago while I ‘woke up’ I noticed this one door behind the administration office in front of the school. Could have been a storage room or... what else? Yes, what else really? The door had been there before I started working at the school surely, but I never bothered to ask or to see for myself. While I walked past, I decided to follow The Impulse. I could see a thin strip of woodprint linoleum running underneath the door. Without hesitation I opened it. Immediately I closed it again. I was confused. A most primal question ran through my mind: “Was it a man or a woman?”
Shortly after, I asked a colleague about the room’s purpose, and he told me that it was ‘used to assess learning levels of new-coming students’. To this day i’m not sure what I interrupted in that room... To be honest, I haven’t got the slightest clue. Life seems like a dream i can’t wake up from.