The Room of a Stranger

It’s been a few years since I started referring to the house where I grew up as “my parents’ house” instead of as my own. When I moved to Europe six months ago, the most important things I had been moving from this home to my apartment in Canada have been condensed down to just two suitcases, while the things I could afford to leave behind from the start stay in the bedroom of the house I once called my only home.

I head up the stairs - fourteen steps - and push down the handle of the first door on the left, the door to my room. As the door swings open, I feel a breath of air carrying the scent of clean laundry from inside the room sweep past me, mingling with my own stale airplane smell. Backpack still slung haphazardly over one aching shoulder, I step into the room and set it down gingerly next to the dresser.Of course the room still looks the same. But it’s far too neat to actually be my own. The three bookshelves, though full to bursting, are neatly dusted and don’t look cluttered. The bed is neatly made, a quilt tucked so tightly into the corners that I briefly consider attempting to bounce coin off of it. The carpet is a bright white, and is covered by nothing but furniture.

No, this room cannot be mine. It is far too neat. It must belong to some stranger.

My jeans smell like the recirculated air of the airplane, and my sweatshirt sticks to me with the remnants of sweat from the eight-hour ride, so I pull them off and search the closet for something else to wear.

The shelves in the closet are made of multicolored metal cubes. I remember sitting down on a day off from school one year to put them together, and feel the ghost of the metal connectors that stabbed my hands as I tried to force them into submission. I wonder if I would ever have the time or the patience to build something like that now.

At first, the shelves seem well stocked with clothes, but on closer inspection, they are mostly cast-offs - old t-shirts, clothes that are too small but which I couldn’t bear to throw away, clothes that are too big but which I hang on to, convinced that I am still growing, though I have remained the exact same height for five years now. I rifle through the old clothes until I find a pair of paint-splattered but comfortable jeans and a soft t-shirt. The paint is from these very walls, I realize, looking around. The walls weren’t always the color of a half-cooked egg yolk. They had originally been pink, a disgusting shade of childish lack of foresight, as I had chosen the color at four and found a new favorite color by age five. The yellow walls suit me much better, and with the light from a lamp in the corner, they give everything - even my own skin - a tinge of gold.

Now dressed in clean clothes, I move around the room, looking at everything I left behind. On closer inspection, the room is not as tidy as it had first appeared. Picture frames cover one of the bookshelves, and I recognize people I have not thought about in a very long time. Our pictures stand side by side but only mine looks strange, and I stare, suddenly realizing that I have changed while these people, these forgotten pieces of my past, will be forever frozen as they are, behind the glass of the frames, left behind as I move on with my own life.

My eyes drift up the shelves, searching behind the front layer of pictures to find the collection of Harry Potter books, the tomes that I would carry around incessantly. My fingers brush the spine of the sixth book; I read this one so many times - looking for answers that just weren’t there - that it’s almost falling apart. These books carried me through my darkest days and buoyed me through my best ones. They reminded me that there was a world out there beyond myself, whether it was real or penned from the mind of another person, to me it existed as an alternate life, in which I learned what I would later discover to be some of life’s most valuable lessons.

Another shelf up, my eyes find the collection of scrapbooks I’ve been building since the first time I bid a friend goodbye. I hesitate, then pull down a small pink one labeled, “From My Friends.” I started it almost six years ago, when my naive teenage heart was discovering friendship and the very first strains of romance. I flip the pages carefully, making sure to keep the postcards and letters and notes on ripped pieces of notebook paper from falling out of the tightly-packed plastic sleeves. Each one of these is in itself a declaration of love, a reminder that I am not alone in the world. I see names of people whose faces my brain can’t conjure alternating with signatures so familiar I could draw them myself. And suddenly I am awash with the scent of heat-baked asphalt at the end of a long summer, two-day old snow sliding down my face from a well-aimed snowball, crisp November air and birch trees by the lake, dust and air conditioning in a school practice room, the old leather of a sofa just big enough for two. All these scenes flash by, giving me just enough time for a glimpse into a chapter of heaven.

Too soon, I reach the end of the scrapbook. I close the covers and put it back on the shelf between the photo albums and journals I am keeping so that every once in awhile, when I come home to this room, I can be reminded of those chapters in a life I once lived, though some days it feels as though that life must have belonged to someone else, because I have become so different now.

Someday, I realize as I slide the book into place, this room will be empty. Whether it is in two years or ten, eventually this room will no longer belong to me. Eventually, I’ll have to extract all the last important items, and throw away the remaining memories.

I look at the bookshelf again, seeing for the first time all of the notebooks on the top shelf. In a few years, they may be the only things that survive. Perhaps it’s for the better. Perhaps I would prefer to keep the memories tied to paper, trapped in the magic of the written words. As I begin to leave the room, my hand hovers over the light switch. I take one last look at this golden haven, and then switch the light off. All I see now is the room of a stranger.