Childhood bedroom
I’m standing in front of three boxes, each filled with objects that hold memories. From an old, broken Christmas decoration that I liked more than the others to my first bra, gifted to me by my aunt, who has small breasts.
I learned from my brothers that my father wanted to sell our house in four months, tops. Actually, it’s more his house than ours now, since we’ve all moved out. I was the last one to go. I moved from my father’s house to my mother’s apartment, which means we can’t really say I was spreading my wings and flying into adulthood yet.
At my mom’s, my young adult bedroom was stripped of anything childish or colorful. But at my dad’s, my prom dress was still hanging in the closet, and all my posters of boy bands and photographs of old friends I no longer talk to were still on the walls. A real museum of who I used to be.
I loved going into that room. Sometimes I would bring a few things back with me that I thought might be useful again, but everything else stayed exactly as it was when I left. It’s true — my father never went into my room to clean it up. As if he were respecting the teenage privacy that still haunted the space. My ghost behind the door, not wanting to be disturbed while I listened to the radio and wrote in my journal.
I felt a rush when I learned about my father’s plan to sell the house. Like nobody had consulted me. They wanted to paint my room and my closet white and throw out all my furniture as soon as possible. They wanted to transform my childhood bedroom into a room without any life, so it could welcome another one.
So I had to choose, in a single day, what I wanted to keep.
But now, standing in this room again, I’m not contemplating it with a sense of completion about who I used to be. Instead, I’m standing in a nearly empty one, thinking about who I’m not anymore. Standing in front of what I decided (out of all the useless things I owned) was important enough to keep. Twenty years of my life in three boxes. I had to say goodbye to everything else.
My souvenirs from my New York City trip in high school. My old journals filled with youthful sadness, crushes, happiness, messiness, and stories about friends. Old fanfictions I wrote in a notebook that I can’t bring myself to read because of the embarrassment. A decoration I stole from my parents of the Rocher Percé in Québec. I like the way it makes me feel, even if I don’t really remember that trip. And so much more stuff, filled with feelings connected to memories I can’t fully picture anymore. Fragments so powerful that I know they mean something to me, even if I can’t quite remember what.
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It’s hard saying goodbye, but I know it’s a rite of passage. I had outstayed my presence, my monopolization of the space, long enough.
One last time, I enter my closet and sit under a shelf in the corner. I used to have a lamp and a pillow there. I would write on the walls and cover them with stickers. I squeeze myself into that same tiny place, looking for the last souvenirs I can’t put in a box.
My eyes meet a piece of writing that wasn’t painted over, on the wooden board holding the shelf above me: “My secret room.” Two stickers of dogs sit beside it, almost falling off.
I smile, thinking about how this place was the least secretive spot imaginable. My brother’s room was right behind the wall, and my younger self sat right in front of the closet door, without any curtain to hide behind. Just an open space between my clothes and my stuffed animals.
But to me, it was special. I made it my own.
And I’m happy that those three little words will stay there a little longer. As if they aren’t ready to leave. As if they represent the part of me that isn’t ready to let go.
I leave my room with my three boxes in my arms and those three little words in my mind, grateful and sad. The two feelings that form nostalgia.
And I think about all the things that are still to come, and how this feeling will hopefully just grow bigger and bigger as time passes.
Grateful and sad that everything is over.
