I do not have many photos showcasing the layout and decorative choices of my childhood bedroom, and this is something I very much regret. Within a teen’s bedroom exists an entire universe that is separate from family and friends and comprised entirely of elements of self: old diaries, ill-fitting lingerie purchased while virgins, trophies boasting baby successes, posters of bands we’d be ashamed to admit now that we used to enjoy. It is a holy alcove where one can simultaneously eschew childhood and cling to it fiercely: it is the place we feel most comfortable crying for nostalgia’s sake, over lost battles or a sudden flare up of heart ache.
As a tween I took to decorating my bedroom with the seriousness of a professional interior designer, though my choices hinged less on trends in furniture styles and more on what I saw on TV. When I was 12 and we moved to Philadelphia, one of the first purchases for my new bedroom was a set of cloud curtains from Bed, Bath and Beyond simply because Lizzie McGuire had a pair. I had outgrown my room in our old house–its pink walls had become permanently ruined by the blue goo that held up my NSYNC and Leonardo DiCaprio posters–and I saw our move to Philadelphia as a chance to reinvent myself and turn my room into the way I envisioned a “grown-up” room’s looking. It took less than a month for the entire thing to be covered in posters, though this time they were for movies I loved (Moulin Rouge, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and ‘cooler’ bands I’d moved on to (I had upwards of 10 Dave Matthews Band posters, of course).
My boyfriend breaks a glass vase we bought the day before at a chic interior design store on Valencia. There is a shard of it lodged deep in his thigh. His legs are tangled with wires from his elaborate synthesizer setup and he is screaming “FUCK FUCK FUCK” over and over again. I look up from the interior design blog I am reading and ask, “Is the vase broken?” and then “Are you okay?” in that order. I immediately feel like an asshole and his leg is gushing blood so I go to Walgreens to buy him Neosporin and Bandaids. I patch him up and go to sweep up the glass, but find that he doesn’t have a broom. The vase cost $32.
This is the world we inhabit now, one straddled between the Ramen-stocked college dorm with permanently dirty floors and the quaint San Francisco apartment decorated with expensive vases. We have vases to break but no brooms to sweep up the mess. I don’t make enough money–and probably never will–to shop at Ethan Allen or Pier One or even the nicer sections of Ikea, but recently I have begun obsessively watching HGTV and posting links on Facebook to fake wall-mounted fireplaces and acting like $2,000 is a reasonable sum to spend on a sectional that will get beer spilled on it immediately after purchase. I have several theories as to why this is, but aside from ‘the biological desire to settle down’ and ‘wanting a familiar space in a foreign city,’ the most accurate is that recently I have felt restless in the way college encourages and ‘real life’ beats out of you.
We sleep heavy, with weighted eyelids. Before, we couldn’t understand the easy breathing of people who simply doze off; in train cars and doctors’ offices and in their own beds they are asleep—just like that. Now we gleefully blame our past insomnia on corporal loneliness and sleep effortlessly, with spare, awkward parts of our bodies touching beneath the covers: first it’s our elbows that graze, then in the middle of the night I wake up with fingers on your ribs. In the morning you kiss me with dry lips and ask how I slept. With eyes still closed I always respond, “Like a baby.”
Like kids, we are always so excited to be alone, not just so that we can kiss and melt, but because we have built an intimate world that is only for us, one with its own routine and cadence and climate. We are only in it when we are alone, together (with our elbows touching).
Together we are mismatched riffraff. We grew up wallflowers, clinging to the corners, forgetful caterpillars who couldn’t figure out how (or why) to turn into social butterflies. We met 3,000 miles away from our respective hometowns, but grew up only an hour away from each other without ever knowing it. This gives us a bond that we can’t articulate, one that is not only evident in the strikingly Midatlantic way we pronounce our “O’s,” but is also coded into our DNA. We dream of similar, familiar things rooted in the distinct places we grew up: opening the first Wawa in California wouldn’t be the worst of fates.