an ode to my childhood bedroom

This room watched me grow. It saw me at ten years old sprawled out on my bed, staring at the ceiling, having no one to talk to for the first time at night. It was the whole reason my parents had given me my own room anyway, so I’d stop giggling with my sister in the dark. Sharing gossip, reading books together, imagining if the future would be hoverboards and flying cars or death and destruction, like in The Hunger Games sitting on the same shelf as Junie B Jones.

It watched me nap on the floor at eleven years old, my window cracked open, the September sunshine bathing my face in rays of gold and blue. I read a Tumblr post about that once, and it was right, nothing bad had happened to me yet. It was there as I sat at my desk studying for hours on end, spinning in my pink office chair that was only soft and comfy if I folded myself up like a pretzel. Sometimes instead of sitting, I’d drape myself over it and let my hair touch the floor, remembering being a kid at the dinner table trying to avoid the last three bites of my food, not my pre-algebra homework.

But I was still a kid. I was a kid for years in this room, longer than I was actually a kid according to the driver’s license that took me so long to get. At twenty-three to be exact, on a gray winter day too warm to snow and too cold to go anywhere to celebrate. Why celebrate the wins so late anyway?

My first kiss was in a Wattpad novel on my iPad underneath my covers at 3am. God, I experienced so many sunrises through the blinds of my windows and the glowing screen of my phone. Once you hear the birds, you have to go to sleep, I’d tell myself, but for what? Another day in my room?

I’ll miss this room. I’ll miss my closet, not for being a sanctuary for my clothes but a sanctuary for the thirteen-year-old girl wedged in the corner sobbing because she looked fat in her skinny jeans. I hated skinny jeans, and I hated myself, but that was a different story. I’ll miss the bags stacked on the top shelf, a monogrammed pink backpack soon becoming a black purse. I never thought I’d be the kind to carry a purse to school, but I needed to feel grown up at some point, despite the shoulder pain. Or maybe in spite of it. I didn’t feel grown up with my paisley sheets or magenta curtains or my hot-pink analog clock on the wall, so I got rid of them all. Except for the clock; all the others ticked too loudly. Or maybe I was just used to that same hum I’d heard since ten years old in this room.

And maybe I still liked pink even as the time had passed.

White sheets were nice, though. White sheets went with the white walls full of dents and notches and chipped paint from the calendars I’d once hung up on the wall, counting the days I’d spent in this room. I promised I’d patch them up one day, but I didn’t want to, because how else would I remember the shreds of my old self that had once been up on display there? I’d tried to hang up a karate belt on there once when I was eleven. It was only gold, but it was my first real badge of honor, even if it looked so stupid and out of place I’d pulled it down a day later. I wasn’t the athletic kid who won trophies or the pageant girl framed in photos; I wasn’t cool. My accomplishments were always found on a piece of paper: a certificate, a transcript, the inside of a notebook.

I started writing stories in purple notebooks in this room. I never thought I’d make anything out of it; it was just another hobby to pass the time, like drawing and dancing and daydreaming. But then those notebook stories became novellas and novellas became novels, and suddenly the loneliness of this room wasn’t so bad when I could control the world with the words. In my books, everything worked out in the end. Every conflict resolved, every wound healed, every argument ending with the perfect apology. I’d spent hours in this room listening to arguments float from downstairs through my thin walls. Sometimes they were about me, sometimes they were about the world that wasn’t as bright and blue as it’d been at eleven years old through my window, when everything seemed possible and not just job rejections and failed friendships and doomscrolling until my thumb ached more than my heart.

When the sun goes down from now on, you’ll miss these four walls, I told myself on my last night in that room, my eyes blotchy, my chest tight, flanked by a fortress of suitcases still unzipped on the floor. Memories bounced in my brain like ping pong balls like concrete as I thought about how hard it’d be to close them the next morning—and not just because I always skipped arm day.

The last one slowed, of me on a mattress on the floor of this room at ten years old. I’d first slept there as a punishment for talking with my sister from the bottom bunk so late at night. Ironically, we still did the same thing on a FaceTime call now, three-hundred-nine miles apart.

No one came to yell at us.