A room of my own
I have lived in many different rooms. The one my parents brought me home to after I was born. The ones between childhood and becoming a teenager. The one I moved out of when I started uni.
When I was about 12 years old, I felt I had to change something about my surroundings, so I rearranged all the furniture in my small room, hung up pictures I’d drawn and reordered the books on my shelf. That was probably the first time I rearranged a room to fit me.
Later, when I moved out to go to university, my Mom and I bought cheap, white furniture to put into my dorm room. I hung up two magnetic whiteboards and for the five years I lived in that room, I’d add new photos and flyers to that wall, making it a scrapbook of my student years. When I went to Wyoming to do a semester abroad, I stayed with family friends in their guest room which had a cabinet of hunting rifles in it, and I put up photos and a couple of the books I’d brought to make it feel more like home.
In Nepal, I stayed at a guest house with a huge bed, white, flowing curtains and a small balcony, on which I sat and listened to true crime podcasts, the surrounding houses waking up and making dhal, kids running around, chickens walking around the back yard.
Then I moved to England, into a shared house at first, where we would often end up watching TV together and cooking pasta, going out on the weekends only to come home to the same place and dispersing into our own rooms. Now I live in a flat I share with my friend and my cat, with floorboards that creek whenever one of us goes into the kitchen, putting the kettle on, grabbing a snack. The flat is full of plants and rugs, cosy and homely, a place we have claimed for ourselves.
These rooms I’ve called my own, they are still out there somewhere, inhabited by new people, new stories. There are different pictures up on the wall, different books on the shelves, different conversations between different people. Still, did I leave a mark? Does the room remember my presence? The scratch on the floorboards where I rearranged my furniture, the white squares on the wall where my pictures hung, the indents on the floor where I’d walked towards my bed every night.
The room I live in now — who’s story is it holding on to before me? Who sat here reading, who had sex here, who got broken up with? Am I now part of their stories just by sharing the same space? How many lives have we intersected with this way?
In our capitalist, individualist society it is easy to forget the marks we leave on other people’s lives. How much the words we speak matter, how easy it is for us to change our immediate surroundings. Maybe this is the place to start, to make a change. Let’s all just hang up some pictures, make this space ours.
