Article by Liza Mcdougall Art by Rusty Rhea
The summer before my freshman year of high school, my family and I moved across Maine to a wooden house nestled on the banks of a salty river. That first summer, I spent my days in my new room (the basement), sheltering from the sweltering heat and rotting in my bed. My mom and I spent an afternoon covering the baby blue walls with blank-slate eggshell white paint. My former bedroom had been beautiful: the result of countless hours spent pouring over Pinterest boards and decorating with my grandmother. Now, I was living in a liminal space. I was in a new part of the state, far away from friends, without any autonomy to venture beyond my house. I was willing to do anything to switch up my space, my energy, to have something to do. I resorted to running errands with my parents. The pivotal moment of my summer took place at the hardware store. Creative inspiration struck, so I collected every single paint chip in the paint aisle. That evening, I spent hours meticulously rolling up tape and sticking the paint samples to my closet doors. The new color in my otherwise blank room made everything seem brighter. From then on, the first thing I saw when I woke up was my paint chip rainbow. Each day was suddenly more bearable, and the unfamiliar space was starting to feel more like home.
One chilly winter evening I had a girl in my class over for a sleepover. We had gotten pretty close that fall, polar plunging after school. Most days it was overcast, and every time it was freezing, but we would still hold hands and run into the ocean, squealing and quickly plunging, then running back as fast as we could to our warm clothes and towels (it’s fun, I promise). We would lament in the way that only fourteen year old girls can, then listen to whatever music we thought was cool that day. At the time of our sleepover, our favorite song had a lyric about swimming topless in the ocean under the full moon. Every time we heard it, we vowed that one day it would be us. That winter evening, we sat in my mostly empty room and looked at the few measly posters that I had put up. It quickly became clear to our late-night minds that I absolutely needed a mural adorning my walls. We scavenged my house for supplies, then spent hours dancing, laughing, and painting a scene on my wall. The mural was inspired by our favorite song and took the shape of what we each aspired to be: a naked woman swimming in the ocean under the moon. After my friend went home, I laid in bed and I couldn’t help but smile while looking at my new wall, reminiscing on the ocean swims of my past and dreaming of the ocean swims awaiting in my future.
Less than two years after moving, there wasn’t a speck of eggshell white left on my walls. I was always on the lookout for items to decorate my space. Everything had a story. The Shrek 2 poster by the window was mailed to my friend by his great aunt. Above my door were different bibs from my cross-country races. I put a single hiking boot next to my bed because I had lost the other one at my local agricultural fair. I’m not quite sure where it came from, but a framed picture of a pixelated strawberry sat on my windowsill. I covered my door with a mishmash of stickers. I put vinyl records on one wall and hung my instruments on another. Many of my acquired posters were tributes to musicians that I loved. I would spend hours sitting on my floor strumming my guitar and singing along to lyrics from the back of my vinyl record booklets, inspired by the posters of musicians on my walls. I covered my bulletin board with different scraps of paper, concert tickets, wristbands, and photographs. One Christmas, I took the lights from the tree and strung them up around my room. After that, I never turned on my overhead lights again. In the blink of an eye, the bright white square box that I moved into had turned into a reflection of my hopes and dreams, my music, my memories, me.
Over winter break my senior year I had some dear friends stay with me. We spent our days cooking elaborate meals, going out in the snow, and laughing more than any of us had in a long time. Having my friends stay with me completely reoriented my perspective on life. They were all from states away and had never seen my room before. What I had grown accustomed to, they saw for the first time with excitement and awe. I don’t think my room was ever the same since. One friend asked me about every single item on my walls. She patiently listened while I explained the different stories behind the artifacts. The various sides of my room were like pages torn from my scrapbook, each wall a captured moment in time. We stayed up laughing and talking in my room until the wee hours of morning. I captured pictures of all of them with my Polaroid camera, and a new tradition was started. From that moment on, every new visitor to my room got a picture that I taped to my window frame. My last addition to my full room.
Moving out snuck up on me too fast. Somehow, even though it felt like I was thirteen and had just moved, it was the summer after my senior year, and I needed to pack up and go to college. While I was packing, my mom flitted in and out of my room, helping. We laughed and cried together while I pulled some of my childhood diaries off my bookshelf and read my entries. I spun my favorite records while I took down my favorite posters and put my life into three tiny boxes, all ready to move across the country. Over the four years that I spent there, my room was forever expanding with decorations. Memories blossomed across my walls. I think my room was complete just a few weeks before I left, when I added one final Polaroid to my window frame. My room was beautiful. Now, however, even though in my mind and my heart I remember my room as complete, I know that if you were to go visit that wooden house by the salty river and go into the basement, all you would see is a room painted eggshell white with a single Polaroid hanging on the wall.