(no subject)
I wasn't going to put this up, but I figured, eh, what the heck. I apologize for length
My walls are cold and unwelcoming: whitewashed cinder blocks that can’t provide the slightest bit of homely warmth at all. The beds are steam-rolled plastic mattresses with colors reminiscent of hospital gurneys, and they’re 20 feet high. I’m filled with a desk, a dresser and maybe some shelves if you’re lucky, but they’re all bare and empty. It’s too dark; the blinds are still closed. And it’s already too hot, or too cold, since nobody’s touched the air for months, not to mention it’s probably been off the entire time I was vacant, so a slight musty smell hangs in the air. This is no place to live. I lack every thing that could possibly resemble a place you would want to come home to.
But you begin. My blinds are opened and warm summer sunshine spills in. My air is adjusted. New crisp sheets are ripped from their packages and fitted over the plastic beds, which are then covered in over-sized comforters and ample amounts of pillows like sprinkles on freshly baked cookies.
You move my furniture around, pushing them over my flat carpet like ants frantically rebuilding their crushed hill. This is your new home, you have to arrange it as you like. You fill the drawers of my dresser to the brim with underwear and t-shirts and jeans. The shelves are stuffed with books and DVDS and numerous knick-knacks from home you couldn’t bare to leave behind. Computers are hooked-up, appliances plugged in, extension cords are bought, clothes are hung, boxes thrown away. My cold, stone, walls are plastered with posters of movies, or huge pot leaves, or the latest witty catch phrase from last year’s hit movie. Prints of VanGogh’s, Dali’s and Escher’s are taped up next to an enormous collage of pictures from the past four years, arranged just so. Like a child, you are careful in your arrangements, young fingers carefully pressing against my walls, wanting to keep the memories constant and fresh.
Good-byes are said. You are alone, or with some stranger you’ve never met before, and know little to nothing about except for maybe their taste in music or the color of their bed-sheets- clues you can deduct from their decorating choices, but you’ll be sleeping next to them for the next eight months. And my stories begin.
Newfound freedom sweeps through you. I see it happen to everyone. Like birds freed from your cages you stretch your wings. Flying out of the coops you’ve been jailed in for the last 18 years, you party. Girls slip into their most revealing tops and tightest jeans, hair pin straight, their eyes charcoal lined. Boys don their newest button-down tops and jeans, roll up their sleeves and spray excess amounts of Axe. And you drink. Don’t feel guilty, few choose to their right to waive this activity. You drink until someone brings back to my doorway, stumbling, shirt twisted and hair plastered against one side of your face. And you collapse into my bed and sleep for fourteen hours straight until your pounding headache wakes you up. Or you spend the night in the bathroom, celebrating your night out. But you go out and do it again next weekend because there’s nobody here to tell you otherwise.
I could tell you stories of sex; lots of stories about sex. That clumsy sex between two people, who have never had the pleasure if entertaining one another before, littered with awkward giggles and apologies. Of hard bed springs moaning that can be heard from miles away and mattresses slowly inching off their lofts so that someone has to stop and push it back, or certainly both partners would fall. Or of passionate sex of two experts who are so happy to finally be free to screw they make the whole room, and everyone on the floor, aware of it.
There are late nights, nights where you down energy drinks and coffee to stay awake and study for tomorrows test. You make flashcards and copy your class notes again and again in what seems like futile efforts, while the hours crawl by, slower than anything humanly possible. These nights are long and the bulb of your desk lamp burns all night. You cry out in frustration sometimes or throw you’re highlighter against my wall, leaving a yellow streak that doesn’t come off and you’ll probably have to pay for, but I don’t mind.
There are stories that break my heart. You lie in bed awake all night, desperately clutching the one pillow that smells like your old bedroom, or some tiny stuffed thing you received as a present years ago, but it’s the closet thing to home you have. Your eyes tear, and perhaps you even cry silently so as not to wake the sleeping human next to you. It’s 2am and you want so badly to pick up the phone and call home and say you want to come back, please, let you come back. Just the thought of your mother’s voice brings waves of emotion crashing down upon your homesick heart. Like infants you long for a comforting touch, but none can be found. So you pull your comforter close to your face and try to sleep, hoping tomorrow will be a better day
My stories are endless. Stories of first loves, old loves, relationships. Of falling asleep in someone’s warm embrace and waking up in the same position, with legs tangled and bad breath. Or of fights and break-ups, screams and tears and headaches and make-ups the very next day. Of waking up with puffy eyes from nights spent crying. Or nights in, where you stay up till 4am and talk and tell stories and wear face masks and play poker and fill your heart with new memories. Or 5am fire alarms that raise the dead from their sleep in what only turns out to be nothing more than an overly steamy shower, but is certain to happen again next week. Nights bundled up when you finally have the room to yourself, watching re-runs of M*A*S*H* until you fall asleep. There were some spontaneous days, some sick days. And let’s not forget the bad night, when all you wanted was to come back and snuggle up in your insanely comfortable bed and your cozy room that seemed so foreign just a few months ago. I could tell you about the flood of emotions that flows in and out through my door all year.
And then it comes time for you to leave me. You expose my bare walls once again, removing pictures with your mature hands: the old and the new ones you’ve accumulated throughout the year, and you put them in an envelop so they will not bend. Slowly you peel off and roll up posters of pirates and bands. “Starry Nights” are pulled down and “The Persistence of Memory” fades from my surface. Boxes are brought in, clothes taken off their hangers, appliances rolled out and computers powered-down. You clear your shelves into boxes and slowly empty your dresser drawers into a big suitcase, haphazardly tossing wrinkled socks and shirts on top of one another. Furniture is pushed back to its original positions. Beds are stripped down to their plastic hides once again. The air is turned off. You close the blinds. You are gone.
But you don’t leave the same person that I saw anxiously enter eight months ago. You have grown. You may not realize it yet, but it’s happened. There’s a difference in your step, in your smile, in your laugh. You carry yourself differently now, for now you know you can survive on your own. You’ve faced some of the toughest moments thus far and you’ve invented ten different ways to eat your Ramen Noodles. And it may be decades before you can look back and see it, but I can see it now. You’re metamorphosis is complete, you’re wings fully stretched. The person who once felt so small and scared in this huge place walks through my door with a new confidence. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a look back.
<3: mollie
My walls are cold and unwelcoming: whitewashed cinder blocks that can’t provide the slightest bit of homely warmth at all. The beds are steam-rolled plastic mattresses with colors reminiscent of hospital gurneys, and they’re 20 feet high. I’m filled with a desk, a dresser and maybe some shelves if you’re lucky, but they’re all bare and empty. It’s too dark; the blinds are still closed. And it’s already too hot, or too cold, since nobody’s touched the air for months, not to mention it’s probably been off the entire time I was vacant, so a slight musty smell hangs in the air. This is no place to live. I lack every thing that could possibly resemble a place you would want to come home to.
But you begin. My blinds are opened and warm summer sunshine spills in. My air is adjusted. New crisp sheets are ripped from their packages and fitted over the plastic beds, which are then covered in over-sized comforters and ample amounts of pillows like sprinkles on freshly baked cookies.
You move my furniture around, pushing them over my flat carpet like ants frantically rebuilding their crushed hill. This is your new home, you have to arrange it as you like. You fill the drawers of my dresser to the brim with underwear and t-shirts and jeans. The shelves are stuffed with books and DVDS and numerous knick-knacks from home you couldn’t bare to leave behind. Computers are hooked-up, appliances plugged in, extension cords are bought, clothes are hung, boxes thrown away. My cold, stone, walls are plastered with posters of movies, or huge pot leaves, or the latest witty catch phrase from last year’s hit movie. Prints of VanGogh’s, Dali’s and Escher’s are taped up next to an enormous collage of pictures from the past four years, arranged just so. Like a child, you are careful in your arrangements, young fingers carefully pressing against my walls, wanting to keep the memories constant and fresh.
Good-byes are said. You are alone, or with some stranger you’ve never met before, and know little to nothing about except for maybe their taste in music or the color of their bed-sheets- clues you can deduct from their decorating choices, but you’ll be sleeping next to them for the next eight months. And my stories begin.
Newfound freedom sweeps through you. I see it happen to everyone. Like birds freed from your cages you stretch your wings. Flying out of the coops you’ve been jailed in for the last 18 years, you party. Girls slip into their most revealing tops and tightest jeans, hair pin straight, their eyes charcoal lined. Boys don their newest button-down tops and jeans, roll up their sleeves and spray excess amounts of Axe. And you drink. Don’t feel guilty, few choose to their right to waive this activity. You drink until someone brings back to my doorway, stumbling, shirt twisted and hair plastered against one side of your face. And you collapse into my bed and sleep for fourteen hours straight until your pounding headache wakes you up. Or you spend the night in the bathroom, celebrating your night out. But you go out and do it again next weekend because there’s nobody here to tell you otherwise.
I could tell you stories of sex; lots of stories about sex. That clumsy sex between two people, who have never had the pleasure if entertaining one another before, littered with awkward giggles and apologies. Of hard bed springs moaning that can be heard from miles away and mattresses slowly inching off their lofts so that someone has to stop and push it back, or certainly both partners would fall. Or of passionate sex of two experts who are so happy to finally be free to screw they make the whole room, and everyone on the floor, aware of it.
There are late nights, nights where you down energy drinks and coffee to stay awake and study for tomorrows test. You make flashcards and copy your class notes again and again in what seems like futile efforts, while the hours crawl by, slower than anything humanly possible. These nights are long and the bulb of your desk lamp burns all night. You cry out in frustration sometimes or throw you’re highlighter against my wall, leaving a yellow streak that doesn’t come off and you’ll probably have to pay for, but I don’t mind.
There are stories that break my heart. You lie in bed awake all night, desperately clutching the one pillow that smells like your old bedroom, or some tiny stuffed thing you received as a present years ago, but it’s the closet thing to home you have. Your eyes tear, and perhaps you even cry silently so as not to wake the sleeping human next to you. It’s 2am and you want so badly to pick up the phone and call home and say you want to come back, please, let you come back. Just the thought of your mother’s voice brings waves of emotion crashing down upon your homesick heart. Like infants you long for a comforting touch, but none can be found. So you pull your comforter close to your face and try to sleep, hoping tomorrow will be a better day
My stories are endless. Stories of first loves, old loves, relationships. Of falling asleep in someone’s warm embrace and waking up in the same position, with legs tangled and bad breath. Or of fights and break-ups, screams and tears and headaches and make-ups the very next day. Of waking up with puffy eyes from nights spent crying. Or nights in, where you stay up till 4am and talk and tell stories and wear face masks and play poker and fill your heart with new memories. Or 5am fire alarms that raise the dead from their sleep in what only turns out to be nothing more than an overly steamy shower, but is certain to happen again next week. Nights bundled up when you finally have the room to yourself, watching re-runs of M*A*S*H* until you fall asleep. There were some spontaneous days, some sick days. And let’s not forget the bad night, when all you wanted was to come back and snuggle up in your insanely comfortable bed and your cozy room that seemed so foreign just a few months ago. I could tell you about the flood of emotions that flows in and out through my door all year.
And then it comes time for you to leave me. You expose my bare walls once again, removing pictures with your mature hands: the old and the new ones you’ve accumulated throughout the year, and you put them in an envelop so they will not bend. Slowly you peel off and roll up posters of pirates and bands. “Starry Nights” are pulled down and “The Persistence of Memory” fades from my surface. Boxes are brought in, clothes taken off their hangers, appliances rolled out and computers powered-down. You clear your shelves into boxes and slowly empty your dresser drawers into a big suitcase, haphazardly tossing wrinkled socks and shirts on top of one another. Furniture is pushed back to its original positions. Beds are stripped down to their plastic hides once again. The air is turned off. You close the blinds. You are gone.
But you don’t leave the same person that I saw anxiously enter eight months ago. You have grown. You may not realize it yet, but it’s happened. There’s a difference in your step, in your smile, in your laugh. You carry yourself differently now, for now you know you can survive on your own. You’ve faced some of the toughest moments thus far and you’ve invented ten different ways to eat your Ramen Noodles. And it may be decades before you can look back and see it, but I can see it now. You’re metamorphosis is complete, you’re wings fully stretched. The person who once felt so small and scared in this huge place walks through my door with a new confidence. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a look back.
<3: mollie