I sit on the floor of my parent’s new home in a room that they have designated for me. This is not the room that I grew up in. It’s the one I planned to first meet over Thanksgiving break, to never know too well but always think of fondly, like that friend of a friend I like but don’t see often.
Now, I’m here for good, and it already knows me too well. It knows that I don’t have a plan and that I traded semesters of the Ivy League, albeit online ones, for lofty ideations of travel and triumph that will most likely cease the way everything ceases these days.
This room knows that I feel sorry for myself. It knows that I feel stuck and scared. Shamefully, it watches me forget, and then remember, what I can and cannot control.
It knows that I’m selfish in ways I didn’t use to be and that I read a lot. Haruki Murakami’s Vanishing Elephant tastes sweet and bitter these days. My ears used to prick up at talk of kids in college, the grades they had stolen and the friends they had won. Now, my brow furrows at the unemployed men Murakami returns to, their feelings of listlessness and potential gone sour.
It’s not that I feel like a failure––yet. It’s that I feel like we are all failures. If the things we once spent our lives in pursuit of can come to such screeching halts, then how can we believe in what we chased, slaughtered, and saw dissolve before the first bite?
Is it perverse to say that I think some of us are relieved? I watch young professionals take walks with phones and earbuds and what they would have worn to the office. “It’s definitely weird starting a new job remote,” they laugh. “But I can’t complain.”
“I can’t complain either.” That’s what the room hears me tell people on the few phone calls I can bring myself to make. It’s a perfect sentiment. Gratuitously grateful––as if my complaints matter at all––but true. I don’t have rent or expenses or any conception of what it means to graduate “on time.” Time feels shadowy and thin, slippery and coy. I want to believe that it matters and that it’s rare, but I can’t help feeling that there’s too much of it, preserved with the salt of myth.
Nothing tastes good. But I eat all the time. The room is littered with dirty dishes and empty cups. Apple bits and coffee grounds coalesce at the bottom of a white mug. I eat the whole apple, core and all, like it’s proof of commitment. I spit out the seeds.
I wonder if the room is the kind of place to have perspective. “I’ve known girls long before you, and I’ll know girls long after.” Or maybe, the room has taken a special liking to me. This is, after all, “an unprecedented time.” I prefer to think that the room does know precedent, has seen many people cry on its floor, slam its door, and bang heads against its walls.
The room of my kindest imagination is passive. Mid-level management at best. These four walls comprise something unexceptional. It’s not the biggest in the house, the closet space is decent, but it overlooks a quiet street with the resignation that it will never know ocean views or mountaintops. It’s okay with its fate.
This is probably when you think that I’m becoming the room or vice versa. This is not true. There are no whisperings of yellow wallpaper or feminist malaise here. The room sees me laugh at the memory of high school English, the time when connecting the color yellow to sickness earned a gold star. High school seems to be the only time when you are rewarded for correctly identifying emotions. Sentences that started with “I feel” are not yet trite but introspective. Now, I don’t bother saying how I feel because it never captures what I mean. I’m nostalgic for a time when colors went with feelings. Ambivalence is not for children.
On the worst days, the room doesn’t see anything. My waking time coincides with its long, sleepy blink. I watch its eyelids, heavy and slow, barely flutter. I’m boring the room, can’t get it to snap its eyes open, rest its wood-colored irises on my bare legs. There’s nothing to see here. I don’t dart out in haste, late for something. It’s hard to be late when there’s nowhere to be. So I let the room sleep. It’s been here for a long time, and I imagine it’s grown tired.
The room will not give me answers to the questions I don’t know how to ask. It doesn’t care how I feel. It’s a room. But it does get to watch. Maybe with the boredom of a voyeur who has seen so much that my body is just a point of heat on some thermal radar no one is watching.
I’m alone these days and sometimes lonely. Even so, I don’t invite anyone in. The room wouldn’t like that. So I descend the stairs when I’m asked to and regale friends of my parents with the tales I tell myself but don’t believe. The adults are children, naïve to the truth that nothing will salvage the feeling that your time doesn’t belong to you. No matter your ripe age or precocious potential, it’s hard to own something you don’t want.
I’ve started to notice that when the room can muster the energy to speak, it doesn’t. Instead, it remains still with defiant stasis, not wanting for anything more than it has. The room is no friend of mine. I can’t be still even when I’m stuck. My knee rocks up and down like a malfunctioning toy rocket, not quite apt for liftoff. I pace and sweat, lace up shoes for walks I never take, and begin and end monologues no one but the room hears. Suddenly, it feels like the room is taking an awful lot of what I have to give, answering to no one and standing for nothing. Am I staying in the room or is the room keeping me here? It would be a lot easier to sort through this if I knew more about the room I’ve begun to call home.
Who or what does the room belong to if it isn't me? Afterall, it’s not “my room.” Does the room belong to whoever built it, painted it, last owned it, or died in it? I think I know the answer. The room belongs to itself and knows an unmovable autonomy, a perfect self-containment that I, even at my best, will never know. I think the room is keenly aware of such fact and wants me to know it too.
I tell all this and more to my therapist on the day I escape. The room, as it turned out, had been playing a cruel game of sucking the air out of my lungs. But he tells me it’s me, that I’m the one who decided to stop breathing. He’s a Room Sympathizer. We count together, and I run barefoot onto the heat of the freshly laid asphalt. My feet darken.
It takes me longer than it ever has to hold onto my breath. When I do get it, there’s only one place to return to. So, I choke and sputter along for a bit, cut through the bramble I’ve never wandered past and emerge in an open field just as the sun turns everything honey.
By Ella Attell.
