My Room I

I’d like to begin by saying that (on my honor) I am not writing from my bedroom. I feel that it is important for my future children to realize the full impact of their future mother’s domestic neurosis.

Although the details are, perhaps, for another day, the fact is that I have memorized my bedroom. Let’s not get confused with the idle memorization that satisfies the urge to not stub one’s toe at 3 a.m. when one needs to rush to the bathroom. No, this is a neurotic, extensive brain-catalogue of items and their whereabouts inside my own personal sanctuary.

The carpet in my room is roughly 15 years old, and was placed in there when I, at five years old, moved into the house with my parents to find that the back room (deemed my sister and I’s playroom) had previously been home to a cow. To clarify, the cow moved in as a helpless calf, and then grew up in the room, as I surely would in the coming years. To remove the unmistakable “eau-de-bovine” my parents desperately carpeted and painted the room a stark white-on-white.

Since I moved out of a shared bedroom with my sister in the front of the house, to a single room deep in the depths of the cave we call the “add-on” 10 years ago, things have changed, if ever so slightly. The walls were painted years ago in accordance with my obsession with the night sky. They are a deep dark blue with funny little handmade stars stenciled on in yellow and some sort of opaque white. The ceiling, my mother’s masterpiece is light blue with big white puffy cloud outlines swirled on it.

The carpet has since been fruitlessly covered up by a clearance area rug that covers all but a 3 foot space between it and all four walls. The rug is a deep blue with spots of green and maroon, and has been hand-sculpted into a lattice-and-rose pattern. It was a kind of gift from my grandparents on a shopping trip. Most recently, I was devastated to find that our new family vacuum would like nothing better than to suck up small tufts of my beautiful rug, leaving the dead, dry rug-bones behind.