The Room

It was spring when I pushed open the door to my room. I was 20 confused within an idea of life that was shadow on an eternally receding wall. Glances towards its origin mystified me , so I just let it use me. Yet at times it was me on that wall. February was still born that year. Unknown to most , I didn’t feel its pull on my jugular. I was running every day , from classes, friends, my past , but mostly from myself. As I opened the door, the smell of carpet and bathroom cleaner greeted me .however it all was lost within a stronger essence which was almost married to the room. Someone had left the window open and February was slowly crawling in, seemingly structured with nothing but smell, it made me transcend that moment in time. I took my tongue out and tasted the air – it was pungent with lilacs, wild orchids and burning pine cones – I closed my mouth, breathing with my closed eyes a world of uncanny beauty , that almost lyrically curled up within me , like the fingers of a searching baby finally at rest in the womb. I took a step on the dying gray carpet and sat down. I had just smelt home. Inevitably conjured a memory from within the most honest in me and given it a home in my room. Wild orchids, pine cones and lilacs grew below my mother’s kitchen garden – little unassuming plants that on most nights slept dreamlessly waiting for another morning of soft rain and the sound of ankle bells on hill women.

That room never left me. I bought new friends, rented memories to fill the vacant spaces of nostalgia , but it was always there ~ a constant humbling presence of a world that I had left behind. I tried numerous times consumed by greed and often by a need for security to feel a few drops of that reality on my skin, in my life , when I walked to class, as I lay in bed staring at how the walls dissolved into each other – but I didn’t own it. It never came back , that surreal day of memory that had been ripped out of my deepest need.

A year was to pass before I could come back to that room. I walked in consumed by the anticipation of last year’s promises and answers unfound. I expected tiger lilies and ice floating on a mountain river – the door was ajar, I walked in feeling as awkward as I have always felt, without belonging, bereft of a concrete need to exist anywhere – the magic was gone. My feet traced millions of patterns on the molding carpet, searched corners, felt the warm wood on my chair, but I had changed. Growing up had destroyed a piece of my fantasy. The enchantment that had lived a comfortable, affordable life in the crevices of my life had somehow left, “house for rent”, no tenants, just bare open rooms and spaces that were emptier than silence.