My sad childhood

It's getting harder and harder to get into the Student Center on campus, especially with friends. I tell them I'm going around the corner to smoke, except they just stare at me and go inside because they know I don't smoke. Then it's just me and my feared enemy: the revolving door. The door that single handedly ruined my childhood. It still haunts me to this day. I have horrible nightmares where I enter one and then the doors stop moving, trapping me inside. Geen liquid oozes out of the sides of the door, I touch it and it burns my skin. I realize it's stomach acid and I scream, pounding my hands against the glass belly of the beast, trying to escape. I always wake up drenched in sweat, my heart pounding a mile a minute, and I know that though the dream is over the nightmare never ends.

But back to how these doors ruined my life. My father created the tool of his own destruction, for he was the genius who designed the revolving door. At the time, he was a strong contender for the Nobel prize in engineering for designing a door that not only expedited both in and out traffic through a building, but also increased heating/cooling efficiency. For a revolving door exists within a strange limbo where it is never closed and never open, and this abomination of nature is conducive to retaining both heat and cold. It was at the grand unveiling of the first prototype door at a military base where everything went horribly wrong.

I remember when the General handed my father the golden over sized novelty scissors and how they reflected the light of the sun like liquid gold. My father raised them above his head and turned to the crowd to deliver his stirring speech,

"Ladies, gentlemen, today is the dawning of a new era. My hydraulically powered Revolv-U-Matic Indoor-Outdoor Rapid Transit System will revolutionize the way we enter and exit buildings. They told me that the door was already perfect, that it couldn't be improved. Well, ten billion dollars in military spending and my genius proved them wrong!" At this point he had to wait for the applause to die down.

"Ladies and gentlemen, behold the future!" My father cut the red ribbon in front of revolving door as the audience stared in awe and cameras flashed in all directions. My father looked at me riding on my mother's shoulders above the crowd. I was only four at the time, and he waved to me as he gave the door its inaugural push. The plan was for him to push his way through the door once and return to his original position so he could field questions from the press. But his hand became stuck as he waved to me. All I remember is him screaming in pain and the hiss of the hydraulics as they struggled to move the door. I closed my eyes and I heard a "thump" noise. I didn't open them, because even at my tender age I knew what it was: my father's dismembered hand falling to the ground. A little hand sized chunk of me died that day, along with my dreams.

That was the beginning of the end. The shameful unveiling of a decades long research project was a terrible black eye to the Pentagon that had to be covered up, and this meant that my father's career as a military research was over. Even worse, that was his wrestling hand. That meant he couldn't fall back on his old thumb wrestling career to support us. My family spent the next fourteen years living in a car, and my world shrank as the doors of Chicago were replaced by Revolve-U-Matics.

God damn the revolving door, for it surely guards the entrance to Hell.