Creative Writing
They talk about nature and nurture but they do not talk about highways. Everyone is a tapestry of everyone they have met who are puzzles of everyone they have met who are accumulations of everyone they have met, and so on. It is this perpetual system that is the American road: one exit affects the next turn, which builds on the next to carve a specific route out of the infinite journeys a car can take.
I am a hoarder in an artful way (at least I’d like to think so). If I let someone into my half of room, I am letting them prod around my intestines, examining each tube and mushy organ of my vulnerable cadaver. My walls are smothered in everything striking, and if every detail is examined the observer will know me. They will see Elvis and Billie Holiday and Joe Strummer and Al Pacino and Courtney Love. Stacks of dried contact lenses and hospital bands from suicide and cracked rib and photos of Harlem in the snow and in the sun and Chelsea, too. CD cases and binders and electric guitar and cheap keyboard and baby photos and toy cars and Pez and paintbrushes and little dioramas and Paul Frank and perfumes and Rolling Stone Magazine and portraits. My room is what the untrained eye will call a mess, and the intelligent observer curated.
My mother bought my room a bookshelf to strongly define the divide between my side and my brother’s. She fed the Ikea men chips and water as they assembled the white wood. She heaved books to fill the slots while I stacked souvenirs and candles. This bookshelf is the lungs of my room (the Lennon of the Beatles). It would be unlivable without. I am shaded by the bookshelf for hours and days when I set out on an obsessive, almost toxic, strive to accomplish some creative feat. This was a trait gifted to me by my mother from the day I was ripped from her stomach, cleaned, and handed to her to raise. She has also generously given me dark hair and eyes and a tinge of judgemental outlook and the power of respiration.
I have a series of grainy photos of Lucia next to my window. She is on her couch face down, face up, on the Columbus Circle train escalator, in her kitchen toasting bagels, smearing butter, making tea. Lucia is the reason I am sure that some people are made for eachother. I know this because if I were trapped in a vast white abyss with her for the rest of time (or at least until a disturbed lunatic managed to activate America’s arsenal of explosives and leave the world unbreathable) I would be without a trace of melancholia– grateful, even. We commiserate about romantic ailments and cackle at shallow humor. We share clothes and sleep like sardines in my twin bed and fuel our egos and delusions. Together, scampering around Manhattan in sparkling jeans and sunglasses, we are immortal.
My quilt is colored brown from Myung’s root beer that won’t come out in the wash, but at the same time I must thank it. It weighs me down and keeps me from drifting away every night. My walls are blistered and warped like a burn victim, yet they shelter me from rain and yelling. My rug is stained and embedded with nail polish and glitter and gunk tracked in from the soiled, festering city. The same rug that Dad and I would Waltz on to Here Comes the Sun, him on knees because I was short and little. My pillow is stained from years of nosebleeds and after shower hair and vaseline, but I cannot throw it away, it has generously borne the weight of my head as I watch television and stare at the ceiling and dream.
My room has lived and breathed and changed at the hands of others, it has morphed in proportion to me. It has been affected by others as much as I have. It has dented and torn as I have ached and bled, triumphed and frollicked as I succeeded. When I wake up, so does my room, cradled by sun and seventh avenue air which illuminates my collage of everyone who has influenced my highway route.