Grey walls

I am leaving today, I am done. Walking out of those doors, I leave you behind. I leave you behind and with you a few other things: coworkers, a universe rich and colorful despite the grey walls and doors and floor and everything, my duty to serve this country. The skills I’ve learned that are specific to this place: how to turn the keys, how to open the cells, how to close them, where to walk when you take a detainee to the health service, when you take them to the visitors’ room, which magnet to put when, which doors to lock, taking them to the shower, to their daily 1-hour leisure time outside in that 5 on 5 meter court with a ping pong table in the middle and a bench on each side. The pull-up bar drilled into the wall on the corner looks misplaced, as if someone remembered to put it there when everything was built already, thinking that some pulling up would do those detainees some good. I leave you behind, the talks we had, the relationships we built, inside those walls. Relationships which would have taken a different shape perhaps, had you not been inside a cell and the lock to your cell inside my hand. The power dynamic did not have to be looked for, nor was it merely intuitive or tangible, it was there, blatant, everywhere you looked, wherever you stood, no matter what you did to give that power away. One simply needed to draw stick figures of you and the detainee to illustrate how clearly and boldly power sat there in the room, filling the space unequally. Inequality, there it was, there in that moment, but after sticking to that detainee during the entire process, every single step of his getting into that cell. It was there, his inferiority facing the prowess of the state.

So I’m done, leaving you behind, after such a short time that we had together, yet got to know so much about each other. And we were there against the state, you knew it and I knew it and we felt it, that it was different. That my place was different. Closer to you, to yours. It struck me so many times when I opened that lid on your door and saw my face mirrored in the glass. It was terrifying, real and still unreal. And it hit me that I could be there, right where you stood, looking at that massive door from the inside, which you had no power upon. It was not you who decided when the lid would open, when food would come in, when someone would talk or listen to you. You had handed your power, all of your being. To that door. That door that is protecting the world from you.

And there I left you, and guilty I feel. As guilty I always feel, since in guilt there’s some of my home. Thank you. Thank you for your trust, thank you for giving me faith in you, myself and the world, and for taking some away. Thank you for being real and making things real for me. Thank you for allowing me to see what I was first afraid, or ashamed, to see. Thank you for allowing me to understand that I can see and be without feeling ashamed. Thank you for teaching me, some of reality.