My bedroom has vanished.

Or rather, my bedroom as I remember it has vanished.
The process didn’t happen quickly; it was two years or more before I no longer recognized the space as my own.

When I left for college, my bedroom still held much of what made it a bedroom: photographs, art on the walls.
An oversized dresser—once my father’s—stuffed with old sweaters, old bathing suits long deprived of elasticity, boxes of clove cigarettes
that I had carefully hidden among old socks.
Also, a bed. Or a mattress, actually.
I have never slept in a bed with a frame, have never wanted to.
I feel safer against the floor.

My parents told me the news before I returned for Thanksgiving last year.
The dresser was gone.

That final disappearance was inevitable, and I thought I was prepared for it.
But when I entered the room, the blank wall against which it had stood for nineteen years still came as a shock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I visit home, I sleep on the couch in the makeshift living room,
a small open area at the end of one hall.
Since the transitioning of my room, there is finally space for a sitting area. Mom and dad are proud.

“We have a living room now!” dad exclaims on the phone. “Wait until you see it!”

“Come look at what I’ve done with the living room,” mom says excitedly when I arrive home.

The old teal trunk now doubles as a coffee table; a brightly colored woven cloth covers its top.

Slowly, these things began to disappear.
The bed—or mattress—went first. Then my bedroom was just a room that still held some items that made it mine. Photographs, art on the walls.

An oversized dresser—once my father’s.

Opening the drawers created a small ache in my stomach. I would pull the handles with a swift downward motion, as I once did to keep them from halting with the weight of their contents.
Now completely empty, the drawers jumped toward me, clattering loudly, and I would be left staring expectantly at nothing. Sometimes a forgotten sock, or a metal earring back, but most often nothing.

I began to sort through the dresser drawers during visits home.
I took all the clothes to the thrift store, save a few large t-shirts that doubled as night shirts.
I threw away the old clove cigarettes, which were too crushed to smoke.
(I tried.)

I started to strip the walls, as well. My mom helped.

 

This purging seemed obligatory somehow, or at least reasonable.
My parents needed the additional space.
I needed to thoroughly sort through my folded childhood, to take inventory of what had been, so that I could better prepare for what was ahead.

I felt as if I existed in two places: an old home, a new home. That feeling was unfamiliar, or maybe scary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suddenly, all that remained was the oversized dresser—once my father’s—now an ancient wooden mammoth.
A tired creature, heavy with time.

My bedroom has vanished. Home has changed.

And while it feels different to borrow pillows and blankets from my parents’ bed at night, to take my clothes to the bathroom to change in the morning, it also feels right.
Because I do exist in two places now. Or maybe more than two.

Over time, I have become fluent in the language of transition.
I use the word “home” interchangeably when speaking of Siler City, Chapel Hill, and Richmond.
I have moved apartments at least 3 times in the past year, and I am beginning to think about where my home will be after graduate school.

Somewhere new, undoubtedly, and unfamiliar.

To Age
(W.S. Merwin)

It is time to tell you
what you may have guessed
along the way without
letting it deter you
do you remember how
once you liked to kneel looking
out of the back window
while your father was driving
and the thread then of pleasure
as you watched the world appear
on both sides and from under
you coming together
into place out of nowhere
growing steadily longer
and you would hum to it
not from contentment but
to keep time with no time
floating our along it
seeing the world grow
smaller as it went from you
farther becoming longer
and longer but still there
well it was not like that
but once it was out of sight
it was not anywhere
with the dreams of that night
whether remembered or not
and wherever it was
arriving from on its way
through you must have been growing
shorter even as you
watched it appear and go
you still cannot say how
but you cannot even tell
whether the subway coming
in time out of the tunnel
is emerging from
the past or the future

On Jo Carson’s thoughts about Johnson City, Tennessee: “She learned in college that when she talked Appalachian, people were ‘either rude or enchanted.’ Gradually she realized she was exotic because ‘I am of, and from, a single place, and most people don’t have the privilege.’ As a ‘placed person,’ to use Wendell Berry’s phrase, she says she is ‘involuntarily rooted…Unless I can see these old mountains, some piece of heart is missing in me…Perhaps in my last life I was a tree. I am from here, I was raised here.’” (From Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard)

VII
(Wendell Berry)

In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there,
watching for himself to return.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.