Inside Rooms
The memory of elephants cannot compare with the memory of rooms. Like a museum of the history of us. In a house made up of rooms, as we pass through one into another, each retains imprints of the things we did there. The walls whisper their memories to us so that we might remember too. The times when we pounded our feet on the floor out of excitement or celebration. Times when we clawed and groped at the walls out of frustration or anger. Things we had long forgotten, but the rooms never did, come flooding back when we cross their threshold. Sometimes we want to forget, and so there are rooms we don’t go into for a very long time. Sometimes we wait so long, hoping the rooms will also forget, but they never do – and no matter how much spring cleaning we do, or how many fresh coats of paint or how many times we rearrange the furniture, they never will.
I have lived in many rooms. Most, I’m confident, I’ll never return to; some I wouldn’t want to anyway. This room, I knew I would return to, but I never expected to stay so long. Only a passing visit, I thought. I will come, I will say hello, pay reverence to the walls that housed me, sheltered me, kept me from the elements for so many years. I will remember the things that happened in them, I will let them remind me of some of the more painful things. And then I will leave. I will let the things that live in this room stay in this room and I will start life in a new room. Make imprints upon new walls and hope that they will be slightly more forgiving. I didn’t expect to stay. But here I am.
Life is so interior now. Everything that happens to us happens inside rooms, whether we intend it that way or not. Everything else is outside. Inside these rooms, we read about outside. We thank the walls, once again, for keeping us safe. We cry and panic inside them, knowing that one day we will have to walk in and remember how we felt on these days. But we also meditate in them, and dream of the future in them, and sometimes share some newly imposed quality time with others in them. And the longer this interior life goes on, the more we are finding that we do not have to be defined by the way our rooms remember us. These rooms may never forget the past, but as we continue to live today and tomorrow, they will retain these memories too. We can build new worlds inside them. And so we will.
Inside this room, I will build a world where anything and everything is possible. If I can imagine it, I will build it. Inside this room I will not be a prisoner, but a benevolent ruler. This room is not my cell, but my kingdom. In this room, the bedsheets are not polyester, but Egyptian cotton and the rugs are threaded with gold. This loveseat is an ocean of comfort and luxury; with these instruments I play all the right notes. This window looks onto an outside that is waiting to welcome me back with open arms. And when I do go back to the outside, and finally leave this room behind, I will take these golden threads with me and I will weave them through all subsequent rooms I leave memories in so I might navigate them with more grace and better ease when this is all over.
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Words and images by Rue // Model: Sotera Mader
