Doors

There is something terrifically satistfying about slamming a door as a way of making your point in a disagreement. Doors serve many different uses in life - they can shut out that which we fear or do not welcome, or simply want to ignore. Likewise they can be flung open in a welcoming gesture. We can lock them, secreting away that which we do not want to see, or that which we do not wish to share with others.

Misha liked doors - he had always associated them with security. Rightly so - closed doors afford much security. To him it had become somewhat of an obsession - he couldn't even think straight if a door was partially open. Not one to excel scholastically, nevertheless he was able to keep satisfactory grades in all subjects but one.
For reasons unknown yet still disturbing, his teacher of geography had the terrible habit of leaving the classroom door open during her lessons. Not wide open - just cracked enough to let in a draft and the unnerving suspicion that someone was watching him from the other side - the lack of security a partially opened door afforded made it impossible for the 12-year old boy to focus on European city capitols or lifestyle in Senegal.
And so Misha failed exams and was repeatedly scolded for his inattentiveness - the teacher was at first puzzled, then irritated, then indifferent. Her questioning of his reasons brought her to dead-end after dead-end - he would only repeat that he couldn't concentrate, and it didn't matter anyway. Not one particularly soft-hearted toward the struggling student, she wrote him off as a boy who, through either stubborness or idiocy, would always receive failing grades in her class.

Misha himself was not completely aware of the reasons for his unsettledness - to him it was just part of who he was. It was this that compelled him to engage in a fistfight with one of his classmates - another boy who simply decided he wanted the bed facing the door. Misha would never forget walking into that bedroom for the first time, and realizing that he had been assigned a bed in the corner, near the windows. His heart began to pound - couldn't they understand? He had to have the bed facing the door. The last thing he needed to see at night, in order to fall asleep, was that firmly closed door - the first thing he needed to be able to see was the threat of it opening. What if someone came into their room? He needed to be the one to see it first.
The other boy simply liked the bed and chose it - doors for him meant no more than floors - necessary elements of a building. When Misha had objected and said he wanted the bed, it became a sporting challenge - ended by a winner-takes-all fistfight. Misha was the smaller of the two, but he fought for a cause, and in the end it was he who laid staring at the door night after night, contented by its closed-ness.