Goodnight, Room

In a series of incredible decisions, I elected to let my parents repaint my childhood bedroom during my last semester of college. I'll share some details to give you a better concept of the gravity of this decision.

First, I take full responsibility. I did it to avoid the emotional trauma of taking down 13 years worth of inspirational Keds ads, class pictures, ticket stubs, and other such paraphernalia of a Manhattan-adjacent adolescence.

And yet, shocker, it turns out that is still quite emotional.

Back to those enlightening details I promised you...I am a loner by nature. I'm actually very social by nature, but that sociability is dependent on a set period of me-time within given time frames. Week. Day. What have you. But in my suburban paradise that place was my room. I loved my room. I spent a shit ton of time there. I read books in bed and did projects on my floor and in the winter I would read books for school next to my space heater and nod off as a combined result of exhaustion and fumes from the aforementioned space heater.

It used to be a heinous pink, because when we moved into the house either my mother or I was operating under the assumption that I was a girl and would therefore love pink. I have disdained pink ever since. But after several years of pleading, when I finally wet away to camp for the summer, I returned to a room that was befittingly wild. A royal blue carpet let loose six different wall shades which were capped with a cerulean ceiling. Lime Green. Sunshine Yellow. Salmon. Deep blue. Aqua. Rose. But the colors became irrelevant as my mind moved at break neck speeds over the next few years to cover my walls with collages, playbills, bands, posters, projects, and pictures from every trip and experience I had. Handmade cups and game boards became homes for pens and my grandmother's old jewelry. I acquired books and t-shirts and hand bags and books and by the time I graduated high school my room was a perfect candidate for that MTV game show. It captured perfectly who I was.

I actually haven't spent more than 4 consecutive weeks at home since graduating high school, and I haven't spent a summer there since before 11th grade. So as I prepare to relocate back to the east coast in my post-graduation spiral, I am made especially nostalgic by the idea of being back in my own room. And I am irrationally undone at the thought of it no longer being mine. I know we all have to grow up and parents move out of houses, and we donate clothes and books and bras...but what I haven't shared (at least not explicitly) is that at the forefront of my irrationality is my sentimentality. I've gotten better at ending things and leaving things, but sometimes a wrench gets thrown in, and the change makes you as miserable as ever.

I suppose it's possible and you're probably insistent that my nostalgia for my multi-colored tornado of a collage that I call my bedroom is merely a metaphor for the waves of change my life has already begun to undergo. But this time, I think it might actually just be my room. Not "just," I mean it's solely about my room. It's about the person I was allowed to be there, the person it set me up to become, and all the less desirable versions of myself that died between phone conversations and replays of Rent and journal pages and America's Next Top Model marathons. It's about having the choice, and looking back and feeling you've made some right ones.

And no place, whether it remains the same color or not, will ever witness such evolution in my life.
So let us bow our heads for a moment in memory of what was, and raise a glass to what might be.

Let me tell you, this time around, there will be coasters for wine glasses.