I Remember the Wallpaper

# I Remember the Wallpaper

## By Daisy Agnes Jones

*“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”*

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

## The Wallpaper

The room is small, like a box that was made to hold something delicate. A cradle of soft light collects near the window in the morning, but by afternoon the sun pulls away and the walls seem to fold inward. It smells faintly of warm milk, cotton, and something older — the scent of paint drying over old secrets. This is the nursery. This is where I sit.

The rocking chair is positioned beside the cot, angled just so. When I hold my daughter here, time does something strange — it stretches thin, transparent, like a piece of skin pulled too tight. Her breath is shallow, rhythmic, like a metronome set to a forgotten tune. She twitches in her sleep. Her fingers curl as if trying to catch something. A thread. A sound.

I watch the wallpaper. I don’t mean to, but my eyes are always drawn to it — a slow magnetism. Yellow roses on an ivory field. Small and tightly wound, as if painted by someone trying to remember what joy looked like. The pattern repeats itself every eighteen inches, forming a quiet grid around the room. At first, it seemed harmless. Charming, even. But now, after so many days in this chair, it feels more like repetition with intent.

There is a tear near the baseboard, a soft curling at the edge where the paper has lifted from the wall. It reminds me of how an old photograph peels when left in sunlight too long — memory fading, yes, but not disappearing. A slow undoing.

It takes a while before I realise what it is. That strange, tingling recognition. I’ve seen this wallpaper before. Or something so like it that the difference becomes irrelevant. Not recently. Not in this life I live now with my husband, in this flat with its muffled corners and tight rooms. It’s older than that. It belonged to the bedroom I had as a child — the one at the end of the hallway, the one I never really felt safe in.

In that room, the light came through thin curtains and turned everything a dusty orange. The same roses watched me sleep, or tried to. I used to trace them with my finger before bed, letting my mind get lost in the endless looping stems. Back then, the house was always quiet, too quiet. You could hear the breathing of the building — the sigh of the pipes, the old wood settling, the soft hiss of people not speaking.

I wonder if I chose this place because of it. Some deep, reflexive draw to the familiar. A design woven into me — not taste, but imprint. Or maybe the wallpaper has been waiting, moving through walls and time, clinging to corners of rooms until I came back to it.

The baby stirs. Not waking — just a little shiver. She fusses more here than in any other room. It’s not that she cries — it’s more like a resistance, a pushing away, as though her body knows something her mind hasn’t learned yet. I hum to calm her. The same tune each time, though I don’t remember when I began humming it. It arrives unbidden, like muscle memory, like prayer.

Sometimes I forget why I’ve entered the room. I stand by the door holding a bottle or a towel and can’t remember which came first — the need or the motion. I glance at the cot, at the rose-covered walls, and I feel as though I’ve interrupted something that was already happening. Something that does not involve me.

This morning, I placed my palm against the wall — not out of curiosity, but a kind of instinct. I pressed firmly, half-expecting to feel warmth beneath the paper. Instead, it was cold, faintly ridged, brittle where the surface had dried and split. The sensation traveled up my arm like static.

When I pulled my hand away, I left a faint mark — five blurred points where the dust had clung to the sweat on my skin. A ghost of my touch. For a moment, it looked like a warning. Or a note from someone I used to be.

I turned then, and in the soft grey light, the roses behind the cot seemed to darken. Their petals no longer yellow, but bruised — like something too tender that has been pressed too long.

I didn’t tell anyone. Not my husband. Not even myself, not really. I just picked the baby up, and held her close, and listened to the silence humming in the walls.

## The Peeling

It began with a sound I hadn’t heard in years. A slow, fibrous sigh — not quite tearing, more like something releasing. Letting go after holding on for too long. The baby had just drifted into sleep, her mouth slack, her limbs limp in that peculiar way babies trust the world. The room was dim, the light filtered through the sheer curtain, and I found myself staring at the loose corner of the wallpaper again.

Without thinking, I reached out and peeled it. Just an inch or two. The paper lifted with surprising ease, like it had been waiting to be touched. Underneath, a layer of old newspaper blinked back at me — browned and crumbling at the edges, smelling faintly of damp and glue and time. I could make out the date: 1976. A fuel strike. A photograph of a man with his hands raised in parliament. I wasn’t born then. But something in me stiffened, as though recognising a scent from a dream.

The next day I peeled again. A little more. The baby was asleep again — she sleeps often but lightly, as though afraid to let go too deeply. Behind the next strip was a magazine page, the kind of thing you’d find in a 1950s woman’s weekly: a roast chicken on a tray, a smiling woman in pearls holding a carving knife. She looked like my mother, and she didn’t. There was a headline in faded pink: “How to Be the Wife He Never Wants to Leave.” Her smile was perfect. Her hands were clenched.

I kept peeling. I told myself it was curiosity, but it felt more like need. Each layer came with a different silence. A different kind of dust. Beneath the chicken ad came a crossword puzzle, half-completed in blue pen. Then a horoscope clipping: “Your cautious nature makes you appear distant. Trust takes time.” Beneath that, a recipe for meatloaf, marked with a star in red pencil.

And then, between two thin, cracking sheets of wallpaper, I found a drawing. It was small and folded. The paper had grown soft at the corners, almost translucent. A child’s drawing, unmistakably: a girl with long black hair and no mouth. Her eyes too large, slightly uneven. One floated higher than the other. She stood beside a lopsided square — a house, maybe — but it had no windows. The sun hung red in the top right corner like a threat.

I folded the drawing and placed it in the drawer of the changing table. I didn’t tell anyone. I told myself it was meaningless. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the way the girl’s arms hung stiffly at her sides, how the lines of her body were pressed hard into the page, as though she had been drawn in anger or fear.

Each time I peeled another strip from the wall, a memory stirred. They didn’t arrive clearly, but through atmosphere, through weight. My mother at the kitchen table in the late afternoons, not eating, her hands cupped around a cold mug. The smell of boiled potatoes, of powdered detergent. Footsteps in the hallway — slow, even, followed by the soft, practiced closing of a door. No slam. Just the end of something.

There was never shouting in our home. Only silence so thick it seemed to coat the walls. Silence that grew around us like ivy, curling into the corners of every room.

I haven’t told my husband what I’ve been doing. He wouldn’t understand. Not because he’s cruel — he’s not — but because he still believes homes are neutral things. Rooms don’t hold feelings, he would say. Wallpaper is just decoration. But I’ve come to believe that walls remember. And that memory, when pressed between paper and plaster, becomes a kind of waiting.

Sometimes I walk through our flat and feel a double exposure — this space and another, layered imperfectly. The kettle whistles and I hear my mother’s stove. A shadow crosses the hallway and I feel the weight of someone long gone, just out of sight. I rock the baby and the creak of the chair sounds exactly like the one I used to sit in, back then, as a child pretending to be asleep.

I don’t peel every day. Only when the pull becomes unbearable. It’s not compulsion. It’s invitation. As if the wall wants me to see. Wants to remind me.

The roses in the nursery no longer look like roses. They’ve taken on a duskier hue, as though stained from beneath. Sometimes, in the half-light, they seem bruised. I run my fingers over the print, and the petals feel like skin — delicate, stretched too thin.

I wonder how many layers I’ll find. And what waits behind the last one.

## Pressed Into the Wall

The room was unusually still, not silent but listening. The radiator had stopped clicking. Even the baby’s breath had softened, a hush barely audible. Outside, the light had flattened into that pale grey that feels like no time at all—neither morning nor evening, just suspension. The kind of light that makes you forget what day it is.

I stood at the wall again. I didn’t feel urgency. Only that subtle pull I had come to recognise. Not like curiosity, but something deeper. A permission. A low frequency calling from behind the plaster.

The final layer came away easily. It peeled like old skin, dry and soft at the edge. There was no print beneath it this time. No clippings. No recipes or women’s faces smiling out of advertisements. Just the wall—bare and chalky and breathing.

And there, pressed into the plaster in the uncertain hand of a child:

“She said she was sorry. He said nothing.”

The words didn’t shout. They didn’t need to. They were still. Waiting. As if they had always been there, only hidden behind wallpaper and years.

I stood very still, as if movement might break something. I could feel the pressure build behind my chest. Not panic, not quite pain. A deep, slow recognition.

The air shifted. I saw myself as a child, standing barefoot in the hallway of another flat. The carpet was thin, worn soft by the rhythm of daily walking. My mother and father behind a closed door. I was too small to know what I was waiting to hear, but I stood there anyway, held still by something heavy and invisible.

Her voice, thin and careful, reached me through the door. “I’m sorry,” she had said. And then—nothing.

Not the crash of something thrown. Not raised voices or the sudden release of anger. Just absence. A silence so total it swallowed the words that came before it.

Even then, I understood it was a kind of answer. A refusal shaped like quiet.

Now, standing in my daughter’s room, those words pressed into the wall like a bruise beneath paint, I felt something inside me give way. A fracture, but a soft one. Something letting go.

There had never been drama in our home. No slamming doors, no scenes. But there were whole days where nothing passed between my parents except glances and gestures. Stillness mistaken for peace. Silence mistaken for understanding.

I leaned against the wall, my fingers brushing the words without touching them. The plaster was cool. I thought of my mother’s hands wrapped around a teacup she never drank from, her cardigan pulled tight as if to keep something in. How she always looked like she was bracing herself.

I turned and looked at my daughter. Her face was peaceful, untouched by the weight of any of this. Her tiny fists, so often clenched, had fallen open in her sleep. I wondered how much we pass on without words—through the air, through gestures, through the way we move in rooms.

I felt a flicker of fear. Not sharp, not immediate. Something quieter. That I might be repeating what I had learned. That the silence I grew up in had followed me, unnoticed, and taken up residence in this home too. That one day she might feel something she cannot name and carry it without knowing where it began.

I didn’t cover the writing. I didn’t call for my husband or try to explain. I stood in the nursery and let the stillness settle again, this time heavier with knowing.

The wallpaper that remained seemed thinner now. The roses had darkened. They no longer resembled flowers at all. They looked like something healing, or something that never had.

I walked over to the cot and touched the edge. My daughter stirred slightly. I said her name, very softly. Just her name.

She didn’t wake, but one of her fingers curled, as if she’d heard me.

And for a moment, the room felt different. Not lighter. Not warmer. But open. A crack in the plaster. A shift in the air.

## Aftermath

The paint went on thin. Soft. Almost transparent in places. I brushed it carefully over the writing, not to conceal it, but to lay something over it — a kind of veil. A quieting. I could still feel the words beneath the brushstrokes, raised slightly in the plaster like a scar that no longer hurts but still changes the skin.

I didn’t strip the rest of the wallpaper. I thought I would — that I would want a new beginning, fresh walls, smooth and untroubled. But most of it remains. The yellow roses stay, their edges greyed now, their petals slightly curled like they’re listening. Or withdrawing. They belong to the room as much as anything else. They’ve seen everything. They’ve held it all.

He noticed the painted patch, of course. One evening as we passed the nursery, our arms full of laundry. He paused in the doorway, looking at it. His eyes lingered. He reached out, touched the edge of the white, just once, with two fingers. But he didn’t ask. I watched him walk away, the same way he always does — gently, distantly, like someone moving through water.

There’s a green notebook now, kept on the table near the cot. I write in it most mornings while the baby naps — not full thoughts, not even full sentences. A description of how the light breaks through the curtain. A word the baby almost says. A dream I forget before I finish writing it down. The writing helps. It gives shape to the things I can’t speak aloud. It puts them somewhere safe.

I talk to her more now, my daughter. She doesn’t understand the words yet, but she listens. I can see it in the small movement of her eyes, the way her head turns slightly toward the sound of my voice. I tell her simple things — what I see, what I remember, what I’m afraid of. I tell her that quiet isn’t always peace. That stillness can mean many things. That women carry stories in their hands, in their breath, in the way they sit at tables and hold back what they want to say.

She sleeps better these days. Her limbs fall more easily into rest. No more clenched fists. Her face is soft, open, unworried. There is nothing more beautiful than the face of a sleeping child in a room that no longer frightens you.

Sometimes I sit there without her, just for the quiet. The room has changed — not visibly, but atmospherically. The kind of shift you feel in the air before rain. The kind you can’t explain but trust. I sit in the chair and let the house hum around me. The wallpaper has stopped speaking. Or maybe it still speaks, but not to me. I don’t feel watched anymore. I feel witnessed.

I’ve learned something. Something slow and strange and difficult to say. That memory doesn’t only live in the mind. It lives in rooms. In folds of fabric. In the way a spoon rests in a drawer. It waits in wallpaper. In the pauses between things.

And healing — whatever that is — doesn’t come from undoing the past. It doesn’t come from silence or from scrubbing it all away. It comes from presence. From standing still and seeing what is there. From touching what hurt, gently, and choosing not to turn away.

I remember the wallpaper.

The way it listened.

The way it waited for me to return.