My Childhood Room

I remember it like it was yesterday. The over-imagination of a child filling in the gaps of a broken reality with a glittery world and sparkly people who wanted nothing more in life than to be your friend. It was behind the brown couch in the front room, etched into the wall. I found it when my parents first started fighting during the day. It was also the same time when my dad first started drinking during the day. I crawled behind that big ugly thing searching for comfort and silence, but found something wonderful.

A hole, small enough just for my small body to fit, with a faint glow leaking from it. It just sat there, as if it had been waiting for me, beckoning me inside with its warm aura. That moment is still so clear in my memory: the faint whispery tendrils that tugged at my mind, tunneling my vision onto that one goal. The next thing I knew, I was inside. 

It was beautiful: made of all shades of pink (my favorite color as a child) with splashes of blue, purple, red, yellow, orange, green; all with a backdrop of pink and sparkles. There were lots of kids inside too, all just as energetic as me and begging me to play with them as soon as I stepped inside. The feeling was foreign to me, but I loved it. We would play all sorts of games, and when we started to get tired, we would go the numerous tables of sweets and get our energy up. There were mounds of cake, baskets full of candy, cups of frosting we could dig our hands in, chocolate fountains and real fountains to splash and wash up in. This world I found was everything a kid could ever want: endless fun, endless friends, endless sugar. The only downside was that the experience itself wasn’t endless as well. 

After what felt like both years and seconds, I would hear my mother calling me through the walls. If she or dad found my hiding place, I was sure they would take it from me. If they didn’t care enough about me to stop yelling at each other all the time which made me sad and scared and want to run away, then why would they care enough to let me have this one good thing? 

After leaving the room, the details of what happened inside seemed to fade into obscurity, like some kind of amazing secret that enticed a deep hungering desire to go back. Each day I stayed a little bit longer, each day I dreaded crawling back into the real world with the ugly brown couch.

A week after I made my discovery, it was gone. More accurately, I was gone. My mom and I left my dad and moved across the country, about as far away from the room as I could have possibly been. I always wondered at the back of my mind if my mom had in fact found my room, and was punishing me by taking me away. I learned quickly not to get too attached to things I enjoyed, because every good  thing was eventually taken away from me. To this day, those few sweet days were the happiest of my life.

Now I was going back. For the first time since I was 7, I was going back to that house where, until recently, my dad had continued to live. After I left, he had been effectively cut out of my life. My mom never really talked about what happened, or why we left, but as I got older and expressed that I wanted to talk to him, a new sort of awkward family tradition was born. My dad and I would talk on the phone for about ten minutes for my birthday every year. In other words, every year for my birthday I got ten minutes of the most awkward phone conversations of my life. Though I was grateful for the chance to keep in touch, and later, I even sent him an invitation to my wedding, which he politely turned down. I was hurt, and even though I couldn’t blame him considering the quality of our previous conversations, I was his daughter, his only child, and he couldn’t even come up with a good excuse to not be there at my wedding! I barely managed to be civil enough to tell him when he had a granddaughter, he asked for a picture, and then, again, shied away from my invitations to see her. 

But that didn’t mean I would miss his funeral.

My dad died from a heart attack a few days ago, right in the middle of his front room. It was out of the blue they said, he seemed perfectly healthy. But since it was so strange for him to miss a day of work without calling in first, a few of his coworkers checked in on him later that day, and found his body, curled up, with a strangely peaceful look on his face. 

But I was still mad at him, mad at the fact that he died. All I could think about was that my daughter will never know her grandfather and I will never know my father. He died, and for the rest of my life, I will only see him as I last did: a scary man who yelled and threw things at my mom when he drank too much of his so called “happy juice”.

That image was stamped onto my eyelids stronger than ever as I waited through the ceremony. I was uncomfortable to say the least, pretending to mourn while his friends and colleagues were genuinely sad about his death. I tried to be respectful; he must have changed since I last saw him, I mean, it has been years. And if these people really cared about him that much he must have been a sort of good person, right? I squeezed my husband’s hand while my father’s body was lowered into his grave. The ceremony was nice, the fact that his friends offered to pay for the whole thing must mean something about how much they cared about him. It means his friends care about him a whole lot more than his own daughter does, that means something, doesn’t it? 

I was unsure since my situation is a unique one, but I could still feel the judgement in their eyes, even when no one was looking at me, it still burned guilt in my chest. I decided I could last this one day, with my husband and daughter by my side, remembering a man who I barely remembered, and what I could remember was full of screaming and yelling and desperate distraction.

The rest of the ceremony was a blur, but the haze finally cleared when we pulled up to his house-my house. The yellow grass out front, the chipped paint on the porch, all of it was the same, just a bit smaller.

The house was mine now. I was his closest relative, so it was mine. All I could do was stare at it, and watch the memories trickle into my mind as I continued to look. My first lemonade stand when I was 6, scraping my knee on the sidewalk on my way home from school, feeding a stray cat off the side of the porch when my parents weren’t looking, and… the room. The strongest and most potent of all my memories drifted to the top, overshadowing all those miniscule moments. I could still feel traces of those soft caressing whisps tugging at my heart, pulling me into the light.

Suddenly I was at the door. My hand held up to knock before I remembered that I had the key; and that no one was home.

It was cold and musty. Dust floated in the air, creating an eerily beautiful scene as the light made streaks of the stuff glow. It was just how I remembered.  My feet seemed to glide across the floor walking down mildewed memory lane, right to the place I adamantly wanted to avoid, yet so desperately desired to see. That stupid, ugly, and apparently indestructable, brown couch.

It was so ordinary and plain. That was the exact thing I thought when I first climbed out. I convinced myself that I had fallen asleep behind the couch and simply had the most amazing dream. But when the yelling started to pick up again, I rushed back behind the couch, the only place that felt safe, only to find the hole still there, staring at me in a gentle chastising way. It was as if it was imploring me why I had such little faith. 

That soft strange voice echoed in my mind days later, and now it seemed to be soaked into the walls of the house. Bearing down and weighing upon me. I still hadn’t heard my husband and daughter come in, so I had a few moments alone to look. I only had this small window of opportunity and I needed to take action now! I would be forever lonely and unhappy if I don’t see the room this instant, young lady!

 I caved to the desperate, painful longing straining my heart, and yanked the couch away from the wall with a grunt. 

I stood there shelled and useless and shocked.

Then a laugh broke through, I couldn’t help it. I curled over my stomach as if in pain until I fell over, literally rolling across the floor laughing. Vaguely, I felt my husband’s hands grab me and attempt to hold me still, but I just couldn’t stop heaving hysterically. His distant cries muffled by my newfound discovery. My focus was completely locked onto that impossible jagged hole carved into the wall; just big enough for me to crawl through, with my new favorite color: a soothing baby blue glow, emanating from within, and the smooth, soothing voice that softened the walls of my heart, broke it to pieces, and lulled me blissfully to sleep.