I have
never been jealous of things and people as I am when it comes to spaces. I don’t
know why, exactly. I guess it’s just the
way it is or – maybe – the way I am.
In my life
I always had to share my spaces with someone else. Don’t misunderstand me:
sharing my room with my brothers for the first eighteen years of my life has
been amazing. I can’t imagine spending my childhood sleeping next to someone
else than my brother or sister.
Thank God
they were there. I had always been afraid of monsters and the dark scared me to
death. But it couldn’t be that bad, as long as they were there,
I can still
hear my myself shouting and crying the first time my brother spent the night
outside, while he was on a school trip. It was horrible. And it took me years
to get used to the feeling of sleeping alone.
But the
older you get, the more you start feeling the unbearable need to have a place
that you can call yours and in which you can put all of yourself. The walls,
posters, lights: everything in a room must say something about the person who
lives there. I needed a room to talk about me.
Then I left
home. I moved away. And it got worse. My first house in London was a nightmare.
A dreary slum, cold and dirty: if you paid attention, during the night, you
could hear the mice running on the shelves of the kitchen looking for food, leaving
their excrements everywhere as a reminder of their uncomfortable presence. I
saw it as a successful attempt to mock me: haha,
try to catch me!, they seemed to say.
And I did,
sometimes I caught them. And every time one of those little disgusting things
died I felt really bad. It was something I did not enjoy doing and that did not
solve the problem anyway.
My first
room in London was not mine. Again, I had to share it: with a friend and a
complete stranger who eventually became my friend. It was not that bad after
all. But it could not go on.
And here we
go. After an endless research I finally found a flat to share with the people I
had chosen. It’s the house where I live now. A beautiful house: three floors,
just refurbished, clean and big, with a beautiful garden. And I finally had a
single room: the smallest room in the house, 3x2, just the space for a bed, a
closet and a very small desk. But it was enough for me. I said to myself: this
will be enough. It’s small, but it’s mine, just mine and I decided to make it
my place in the world.
When I
entered it the first time it was all white. White bed, white walls, white
curtains. I built it very slowly. I slept every night in that white bed,
thinking of all the colors that I would give it when I’d had time. I worked 60
hours per week at the time, with one day off if I was lucky. I took the
measures, went to IKEA in three different days: bought a small desk, a lampshade,
new curtains: they were red. I rented a van and brought them home. And then I
bought a duvet, and a mirror, and a big clock. I bought six pieces of wood and
I made shelves out of them. And after one month and a half I unpacked my
luggage and filled the shelves with my books, CDs, movies. I filled the wall
with pictures, notes, posters. I did it: I made it my place in the world, a
place where it would be nice to come back even after the shittiest day. Everything
in this rooms, both the things that I’ve done and that I haven’t done yet, says
something about me: it says something about the last five months of my life. I
take a look around and I see everything I’ve been through and that I achieved.
And I feel a little more proud of myself.
The thought
that I would have to leave it haunted me since the very first day: it’s too
soon to think about it, I said.
But life
always finds ironic ways to fuck you up. It’s something you’ll never believe: my
room may ‘’disappear’’, one of these days.
A few Chinese
workers entered my room this morning and started yelling weird things in their
language. Than I met my landlord, who said something very weird. ‘’They’re
gonna have to work on the roof of your room. Make it smaller. Start removing
your stuff and packing’’
Nothing I
can’t handle, I thought. A few days on the couch and then I will be back in my
room, I said.
‘’’They
might even reduce the length of the room, destroy the walls and build new ones.
It will be very small afterwards. Too small to be even considered a room’’ –
she continued.
A few
confused words, and then she left. She left me with the doubt that my room, in
a few days, might not longer be my room. To be precise: it might not be a room
at all.
And I know
what you’re thinking, ‘’First world problems, find a new place and get the hell
over it’’. But the thought that someone is going to destroy what it took me so
long to build leaves me shaken. The fact that I am going to have to start it
all over again – in a new room or in a smaller version of the old one – is making
me sick. The fact that they are going to destroy the shelves that I built, rip
off the pictures I hanged, stain the walls that I painted, is giving me creeps.
The fact that in two months or so I might even have to leave my house - my
nice and big house, the place where I made my first Christmas three and called
home for five months - is making me sad.
It’s a sad
metaphor. It makes me realize that nothing I have is truly mine. Nothing and
nobody you have is yours forever. Everything and everyone comes and goes and at
the end of the games you are all alone, by yourself, with a new room to build up
with your bare hands.
Enough with
this drama for today. I might receive good news tomorrow. Maybe my room will
still be my room. Maybe I will have a new, bigger room, where I will finally
have space for a beautiful, comfortable chair that I’ve desired for so long but
could never have. Maybe. Or maybe not.
I will end
this post with a few words from a song I was listening to a few days ago that
now sounds amazingly prophetic:
‘’But if my
life is for rent
And I don’t
learn to buy
Well I
deserve nothing more than I get
‘Cause
nothing I have is truly mine’’
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