If you were to ask my what my pride and joy of my senior year was from August until today, I would’ve told you my room in my pink house. Not my cap and gown… my literal room.
I have written many an article about the twinkle lights that I have had since freshman year and the way that they flicker every time I hit a button on my Roku TV remote because, somehow, they are synced up.
I have written many an article about the CD stacks that just keep growing, and growing, and growing in circles around my Lisa Frank sticker-covered CD player from my mom’s old coworker.
I have not written an article about this, but my closest friends know that I even find my warped mirror from our house’s crooked walls endearing.
My room truly is my sanctuary, and I take what some would call an absurd amount of time to make it feel like an extension of every branch of my life.
Given that graduation is a blink away, I decided that for the first time in four years, I would actually get a jump on packing.
My room is literally a clothing bomb right now, so I knew that I couldn’t start there without tackling “laundry mountain”, as my mom would call it, first. So THAT was out.
I also didn’t want to touch the downstairs with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole because that is a conglomeration of my items as well as my roommates’ items. And to be completely honest, after two years of living together, I can’t really remember what belongs to whom.
So that left one option: the ITEMS in my own room.
Spoiler and slight confession: I said that I was going to do this for like, two weeks straight now and just haven’t, but given I had ONE singular class today, I would’ve felt uberly unaccomplished if I did nothing.
So, with trash bags in hand… I trudged up my very steep staircase (this time especially, it literally felt like Mount Everest) to begin the long and tiring process.
When I finally reached my room, I couldn’t start.
I kind of just stood in my room spinning in circles, darting out here and there to get really close to something on my wall or my desk or my dresser. To an outsider, it may have looked like I was just about to pick something up and begin cleaning; however, I was just getting closer to get a clearer look.
The item I decided to begin with was my paper plate awards stuck on my wall behind my TV from past semesters in Her Campus, on the Dance Team, or even at my summer job. The bright blue painters tape I stuck these on the wall with felt like it had solidified to gorilla tape over the year, given that it felt like no matter how hard I yanked on them, they simply did not want to separate from the wall.
Or… maybe it was that I didn’t want to separate from the wall. Walls, plural, actually…
The four walls encapsulating my life for the past year in a pink hue.
The four walls holding in all of my memories.
From my last paper plate taken off the wall, being the one from my summer job, I then darted over to my scrapbooking pages in frames I made with all of my bits and bobs from the past summer.
I took one look at my ticket from the butterfly garden we all went to as I pulled the frame off the wall and flew to my desk drawer that contained all my past dance show tickets.
When the last ticket entered my memory shoebox, I looked up at the programs hanging all around my twinkle lights from the past shows we have done or I have seen and pulled each down, smiling with admiration as each one went.
The connections from one piece of decor or item that existed in my room to another just kept connecting and connecting until I was left in an empty room, somewhat strangled and definitely choked up by the web of love I am lucky enough to live in.
Knowing me, you can probably picture this, but I sat in the middle of my bed, crisscross applesauce, and cried.
I cried because of how sad it truly was to remove and pack away my life for the past four years.
I cried because instead of one step and knock away either forward or to the right, it will have to be two memorized phone numbers or 8-hour road trips.
I cried because I am so lucky to have had this experience that is unable to be put into words.
So, while the writing is now technically OFF the wall, my story, until the very last chapter, now has the three best co-writers that I could ever ask for.