Childhood Bedrooms as Portals

I am sitting in my childhood bedroom, looking at the same tree that I’ve looked at for fifteen years as it slowly takes over the power line in the front lawn.

I’ve always had a deep curiosity for the childhood bedrooms of my friends- I feel it provides insight into something true and essential about them. The first time I saw my partner's old bedroom, I sat on his bed and scanned the four walls, trying to imagine his 15-year-old self and how he might spend his time in the space. I then launched into a series of rapid-fire questions, meant to be said with a benign and harmless kind of interest, but landing more like enhanced interrogation techniques-

“How long did you usually spend in your room? Was your door always shut or sometimes open? When it was open, did your family come in and out frequently? Did you ever have girls in here? How did you decorate it? Did you ever move your bed, or was this always the layout?”

I felt, as I often do, a deep need to understand what his experience was. And not just a cursory overview of his recollections, but a no stone left unturned type of understanding.

I felt this same way upon seeing one of my friends' rooms right before she moved- I sat on her bed as she tried on a dress in the ensuite washroom. I imagined what it would be like to go over after school, to lie on her bed and not talk about anything in particular. As you get older, seeing friends becomes more and more of an event. I both love and hate this reality- while it feels undeniably adult and sophisticated to “get drinks” on a Tuesday night in Toronto, it is also expensive, loud, and involves a minimum of 10 back and forth texts and one reschedule. On the other hand, seeing friends when you were 15 was constant and casual. There’s a vulnerable intimacy to a bedroom hangout, one that I miss dearly.

As I’m sitting in my own old bedroom, I’m imagining all of the different versions of myself that have existed here. She feels increasingly like a stranger to me. In the novel A Girl's Story by author Annie Ernaux, she reflects on a photo of herself taken nearly 55 years prior, stating- “The girl in the picture is not me, but neither is she a fictional creation. There is no one else in the world I know in such vast and inexhaustible detail.” This third space of existence- of being viewed neither as having a narrative separate from one's own person, nor as being a retrievable past version of one's current self- this is where the younger self lives. In my experience, this space can take on a dream-like quality.

Dreams often have a way of holding many seemingly contradictory truths right next to each other and making it feel like the most natural thing in the world. They can create a space that is entirely new to you, while also feeling more familiar than your own home- or present versions of people in your life that are opposite to reality, but that ring so deeply true it feels impossible not to be. This is, in my opinion, part of what makes dreams so deeply unsatisfying to have retold to you. How many times have we all sat through a friend telling us about how “you were you, but like a different more intense version of yourself- and we were at my apartment, but it was also a mall….” Trying to put the memories and feelings of our past selves into words can take on a very similar tone- a monologue of addendums and similes to try to get our point across.

When I was younger, I spent most of my time in my room- and most of that time obsessively worried. Worried I had worn the wrong shirt or the wrong hairstyle or the wrong combination of the two on the wrong day- worried I was morally irredeemable, that there was something innate within me that, if not killed, or at the very least pruned back, would overtake me. A persistent and fickle preoccupation with the idea of something being “wrong”- and needing to correct that wrong until it was just right. I wasn’t diagnosed with OCD until much later in life, by a therapist whose pet parrot would often interrupt sessions by repeating my statements back to me- which had the very embarrassing effect of a friend who is so shocked by your admissions that all they can think to do is repeat them back to you. “stayed up till four? Sitting on the couch? Staring at the wall??”

I later stopped seeing this therapist- not because of the parrot, who I had gotten used to, but because she fell asleep in our session- that, and I had run out of money. 

Along with my obsessions and anxieties, I also had a deep impulse to record things. Not so much out of a fear that I would forget them, but more so because it made the current moment feel more valuable. On the door of my closet, there are height markers scrawled next to a line of pennies glued on by the house's previous owners. I remember feeling so curious about this mysterious little girl who had this room before me-what did she do in here? Did she put her dresser in the same place I put mine? Is she sad that I took her room? One of my height lines says, “Rachel, June 20th, 6:00 pm, 12 years old.” If I could have fit a journal entry on the door frame, I would have.

I think there would be a lot about my current 26 year old self that she would be somewhat unimpressed with - The fact that my cooking skills are severely stunted and require all hungry parties to reeeaallyy like eggs and toast- the fact that I’m pretty sure I still don’t know my actual bra size (does anyone?), my unfinished degree, and my lack of financial stability.

That being said- I like to think there are a few things she’d actually feel pretty good about. My home, that feels like an equal mixture of my and my mom's decor, my friends who I feel deeply understood and loved by, my reputation for making the strongest drinks out of said friends, and my music- the fact that music is still my centerhold. I am more proud and excited to share these songs than I can say- and I think she would be too.