My bedroom is a shape no other room should be. It’s built like a square horseshoe, a left bracket symbol with elongated sides. The bed is nestled snugly into a space so small that when I sit with my back against the wall—head tilted forward on account of the sloped ceilings—my feet rest on the opposite wall. Around the corner from my affectionately dubbed cocoon is a bookshelf I can only partially see, which, apart from a coffee table, is the only piece of furniture in my room. I don’t even have a bedframe, just a mattress on the floor.
My dad built the bookshelf himself, finished it before I had slept a night in the room, and filled it so that its stained brown shelves curved under the weight of collected National Geographics and Kazuo Ishiguro novels. Tucked in a corner, it opens like a greeting, safeguarding my possessions everytime I’m away. My first crush lives in between the pages of the books, my lost friends in the loops of a crocheted plush. The annotated copies of my favorite books beg to be rearranged yet won’t be; I’ve grown too attached to the familiar color patterns their spines form. It’s sturdy—it can’t be moved, bolted to the walls. I have three or four copies of the same books and candles I’ve never lit: little anthologies of my life. When I came home for break, I was carrying new books for the shelves to absorb.
I wish that I could call it my childhood bedroom, but it’s not. My childhood bedroom was a regular square, and the walls were two different horrid shades of purple that clashed with my sister’s and my polka-dotted and striped twin beds. Every year, we rearranged the room in a desperate bid for more space—my sister was a messy child, and I the opposite—but I loved that room, wearing a divot the shape of my body into the mattress.
When I left for college, the walls were painted white, our furniture was tossed, and the room became my sister’s. I alternated between sleeping in her bed and on the living room couch, adrift even while home. It was then that my dad decided to redo the attic, and for one perilous summer, every time I wanted to enter my new, horseshoe-shaped room, I had to climb up a ladder and walk across a plank.
My attic room is temporary, a space built for the few summers that separated me from graduation. It’s small. There’s only about two square feet I can stand up straight in. It’s an afterthought—a room built to be vacated. Yet I don’t want to let go. I fall asleep to the sound of my little brother gaming, and wake up to the birdsongs of his parakeets and my dog—who knows how to climb up stairs but not down them—whining to be carried downstairs. Just last week, my sister made me a clay bear and I added it to my bookshelf. The framed photo of my grandparents, the typed poem I bought in a park, the tiny bird figurines that line the shelves; the room is made up of thousands of little mosaic tiles that, taken together, form a rough amalgamation of my life.
I don’t know how to leave, how to let go of that horse-shoe shaped room. But then I remember when the room was still bare, the bookshelf only a sketch that existed on paper. I didn’t mourn the loss of that first room—instead, I spent hours thrifting for the perfect coffee table. The bookshelf may stay behind, bolted in place, but my books will come with me, wherever that may be.
