White washed.

Theme Week 6: The Placeness of Places

A room has six sides, like a big, cardboard box. The four walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Sometimes they seem to shrink back and strangle you, and other times they feel like they're too far away, in the space you have it's lonely, and cold.

I look at my four walls and smile. I can see a lot of life is in this room. I hated watching it slip from my fingers. My very first bedroom, one I could call my own, with crimson walls covered with poetry and prose, and blends of acrylic paints drawn into shapes and pictures only my mind would hold. There were a few times I abused it, my space. There's a hole or two in the plaster.

I remember one came from wrestling around on the bed with Josh. Somehow both my heels ended up going right through the painted drywall. I wasn't scared about that, I was scared about the, hitting the other side, the hallway. My mother was so mad.

One of the whole is right by the chimney, now unused.

"why don't you get your lazy ass outside and smoke your cancerstick 100 feet away from the house so other people won't have to stew in it?"

I hated my sister for that. She just sat in her room, smoking and smoking, and it would seep through the floorboards and the cracks in the walls and soak in my blankets and by hair and my nostrils. I woke up many days with a sore, raw throat, from the two of them, both my mom and my sister, smoking in the livingroom below my space.

In a way I'm glad I don't have to sleep there anymore.

Sitting on that bed, my bed, on the last night I was going to be there, in my space, did bring me to tears. I cried over the memories. A great majority of my growing up was done in that room, under the stained glass chandelier, and the glowing neon stars, and the posters dotting the walls. I grew under lyrics painted and shakespearean sonnets in chunks around the corners. The pine floors were the nicest in the whole house, laquered and well-cared for. I cared for that room. I think the floors were the original planks from when the house was built in 1901.

I remember when the foundation was restored. When they jacked the house up, I sat in my room, and watched a crack slowly form, like an earthquake, in the middle of my Pink Floyd "The Wall" mural. I watched the paper wrapping of the drywall split as the house straightened out. It was eerie, knowing that fixing some parts ruined somewhere else, much like plastic surgery, or medication. You take a drug just to get side effects. Ironic. I guess what's even more ironic, is that it was almost pointless. If I put a marble on the floor, it still rolls. I guess it didn't fix it as much as my mom would have liked it to.

None of this really matters much anymore, though. The space isn't mine anymore. Tiffany smokes her cigarettes and writes all over the walls that were once so brilliantly stained with bits and pieces of me. Where my murals were, she let her friends doodle and sharpie them to death. Where hidden messages in red crayon were written for me to find, my mother scrubbed and painted over them, in a sickening, periwinkle blue. Pieces of my life with Josh have been erased, because she didn't like the red.

I will always rememebr what my space was, because it was mine, the only space I could ever call mine. It's not even Tiffany's anymore, It's my littlest sister's now. Which I would have much preferred than Tiff having it. It looks so special to see Morgannes colourful display of care-bears and barbie dolls along the red walls. It's a much happier place with the innocense of youth in every corner.

posted by Kasey @ 1:26 PM