A Room of Her Own

The guest room felt like it belonged in a hospital rather than a home. The walls were a white that blinded in the morning sun streaming from the small windows. The carpet was a beige reminiscent of the 70s but with perfectly parallel vacuum tracks traversing the length of the room. The bed linens, the side tables, the dresser, the lamps were all a perfectly spotless white. This room didn’t seem like it had ever been inhabited by a human being, especially when juxtaposed with the rest of the home, which was overrun with children’s toys and dog hair and life. This one space was perfectly sterile.

Suitcases moved in, drawers were opened, linens were rumpled. For a time. The grandparents visiting, a friend needing a place to crash, this or that family member who “hasn’t seen the kids in forever.” They moved their dirty, teeming lives into the room and spent days or weeks undoing the work of making the space what it is. Not necessarily inviting, but a reprieve all the same. They turned the room into the rest of the house, the rest of the world for a while and shattered the otherness of the space. But wasn’t that the point? Why have a room no one can enter, a bed where no one sleeps, blinding white walls without eyes to see them?

The blankness of the room has purpose, beyond being a place to stay it is a place to create every time someone enters. The walls are white so you can plaster them with what you need. The carpet is fresh so you can leave footprints in the lines. The sheets are bare so you can dream them to be any pattern you desire. And when you leave the room can be reset to its default state and allow the next guest to make the room their own while they stay within its walls. The purpose of the guest room was to suit any and every guest, not the host.

She stood in the doorway of her guest room, her feet not quite touching the place where the vacuum lines began. This space, despite not being for the host, was definitely for her. Cleaning the room after a visit was like cleaning out the guest. It was a physical manifestation of her moving on to the next thing and clearing out the marks the guests left on her walls and her floors and her brain. It was the only room in the house where she had complete control, no family, no pets allowed. This room, with its sterile hospital walls, was her therapy. Or it used to be. Now at the time when she needed her therapy the most, she was losing it.

Her sister had died in a car accident last week. She still hadn’t quite grasped the concept of life without her sister yet but time kept moving forward while she attempted to wrap her mind around the space where her sister should be. Taking up all the space in her mind at the moment was instead her niece. Her sister’s daughter who now had no mother. Who was supposed to be coming to live with her in the next few days. A teenage girl needed her own room and the only one she had to offer was this one; this lifeless, empty room. Her room. She didn’t know how to part with the room and the space it held for her, but she also didn’t know how to change it so it belonged to her niece. This room didn’t need to suit any and every guest, just one.

She hardly knew her niece. Her sister had lived on the other side of the country and they visited one another once a year. Her sister and niece had stayed in this room together just 6 months earlier. But this time was different. Permanent. She didn’t know what colors her niece liked or what music she listened to or what she liked to do after school. How could she make this room perfect for a girl she barely knew? A girl going through the worst thing that’s ever happened to her?

She walked fully into the room and shut the door behind her. She was separate now from the rest of her life; maybe here she could figure out what to do. She sat down on the plush carpet, ignoring how wrong it felt to ruin the lines on the floor. She spread her legs out, took up space, destroyed more of the room with her existence. She became the guest in that room for the first time in her life. She opened the dresser drawers and turned on the lamps and opened the blinds and rolled around on the floor and laid down under the covers and fell asleep in her guest bed for the rest of the night. She reveled in being a guest. She plastered the walls with her feelings, filled the drawers with her tears, left her heavy footprints in the carpet, dreamt of a world where her sister was alive and her sheets were a pink tartan pattern just like when she was a child. And when she woke up the next morning it wasn’t her room anymore. Now it was her room, her as the guest. The room had been what she needed when she needed it and now it was hers. Just like it was for her guests.

She didn’t change the room. She left it just the way that it was. She made the bed, closed the drawers, drew the blinds, turned off the lamps, and closed the door behind her. The room didn’t feel separate anymore. It felt like part of her life now, part that would soon look different and that was okay. Her niece could create the room that was right for her when she wanted to; the room was a blank canvas for her to paint her dirty, teeming life onto and make the way she wants. The room was someone else’s therapy now, but it was also, for the first time, a part of her home. Just like her niece would be.