For the past few months, I have been painting, sanding, chipping, ironing, crying at, smiling at, rearranging, and screaming at my room. At the moment, it's a wonderful, soft shade of lavender, hung with Battenburg lace curtains. My various possessions are tossed around, almost as if someone loaded my little chamber up onto a ship, and in the night it wrecked, and I never noticed.
It used to be white-- painfully white, with a blue-and-white striped border tacked up onto the wall. The border was taken down long ago, but the dowels that edged it are still there. I left them and the space between them to break up the wall, the endless sea of purple.
And then decided I didn't know what to do with the empty space. Of course, there needed to be something there-- I couldn't just have a stripe of white, you know. That just doesn't do.
So, today, Alejandro and I took a trip to the public library. It's so beautiful there... I almost feel as if I'm walking into a church, the way the building just opens up before me. Swirls and eddies of colour stain the glass at the top of the enormous room, and pictures of austere, well-established citizens that I never knew adorn the brick walls.
Tucked away, in a corner, is a little shop where you can buy used books. I swiftly chose five hardcover books that looked interesting, including a child's book full of fairy tales that I found bizarre and delightful.
I pulled crisply-crumpled dollar bills out of my pocket and handed them over to Heather, one of the librarians. And then, the books were mine, their pages meant to adorn my walls and collage the tops of my desk and dresser. Alejandro laughed at me, knowing that before I could paper my walls, I would have to read all of the books.
How strange that I revere books the way that I do, and yet I put them on my walls. I suppose, in a strange way, it's a manner of immortalizing them... though I've never even heard of the people I'm plastering around my room. I think it's just the way to make my room look less fluffy... and more like a writer lives there.
It used to be white-- painfully white, with a blue-and-white striped border tacked up onto the wall. The border was taken down long ago, but the dowels that edged it are still there. I left them and the space between them to break up the wall, the endless sea of purple.
And then decided I didn't know what to do with the empty space. Of course, there needed to be something there-- I couldn't just have a stripe of white, you know. That just doesn't do.
So, today, Alejandro and I took a trip to the public library. It's so beautiful there... I almost feel as if I'm walking into a church, the way the building just opens up before me. Swirls and eddies of colour stain the glass at the top of the enormous room, and pictures of austere, well-established citizens that I never knew adorn the brick walls.
Tucked away, in a corner, is a little shop where you can buy used books. I swiftly chose five hardcover books that looked interesting, including a child's book full of fairy tales that I found bizarre and delightful.
I pulled crisply-crumpled dollar bills out of my pocket and handed them over to Heather, one of the librarians. And then, the books were mine, their pages meant to adorn my walls and collage the tops of my desk and dresser. Alejandro laughed at me, knowing that before I could paper my walls, I would have to read all of the books.
How strange that I revere books the way that I do, and yet I put them on my walls. I suppose, in a strange way, it's a manner of immortalizing them... though I've never even heard of the people I'm plastering around my room. I think it's just the way to make my room look less fluffy... and more like a writer lives there.
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