A Briefly Detailed History of My Bedroom ☆.｡.:*
Artwork by Sophie Wishart
My dad says we will never move house again because the first move stole too much life to repeat. I remember being 6, crouching on a stack of dusty phone books, eating pasta in the middle of a newly empty asbestos-walled Connells Point living room, at odds with the house I’d spent my whole life jumbled inside.
I started sleeping on my own at 8 years old because I was a fearful child; and I was a creative child, smashing my Lego Friends sets to build my own high-rise apartments and using textas to give my Barbies split-dye hair (mirroring who I was going to become).
Then, in lockdown, I would pull all-nighters and hide behind my bedroom door. With torpid eyes, I sat quietly painting my friends’ calculator covers with aesthetic sunsets, complete with strange, feathery clouds. At some point, my room turned from playroom to safe haven. I was a late bloomer, but I slowly morphed into a typical teenager, shutting my door and hiding out in bed.
“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us” Fall Out Boy, ‘Just One Yesterday’, Save Rock and Roll (2013)
That was a quote I added to one of the music posters, made by yours truly on Canva (Grace (1994) by Jeff Buckley, Collide with the Sky (2012) by Pierce the Veil, Beatopia (2022) and Fake It Flowers (2020) by Beabadoobee, etc). These popped up alongside Smiggle paraphernalia. I stumbled out of bed too quickly, one morning, and fell onto my Lego sets, sending shockwaves through Heartlake City. I had shed my old life and begun living a new one, sleeping next to the mouldering skin of my childhood self.
I felt anchored to my bed; home was not the house I had grown up in, but the soft bed I had spent so much time crying and stifling giggles in. I was confidently alone and away from words and voices in a world that no one else could enter.
One day, when my then-boyfriend was over for a swim in the middle of summer, I convinced my parents to let him have a look at my bedroom. My heart pounded as I showed him up the stairs and creaked open my door. I was proud of my artwork littering the walls, and my cool-super-duper-epic-hand-painted guitar sitting in the corner. We came to sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the bed. It was aberrant to see someone in a space never occupied by anyone else before, I became scared that my bed frame might snap. He looked around in… awe? Shock? Confusion? I couldn’t tell.
And he said these two phrases. Littered with chuckles.
“How do you live like this?”
Followed by
“Can I send a video to my mum? She’d find this funny.”
I felt more crushed than my Lego Friends Heartlake Lighthouse. Shame rose within me in a way I had genuinely never felt before. His eyes glossed over my extensive CD collection, my family’s unfortunate surplus predicament, and landed on something entirely worse, a place teeming with mess. He was both appalled and unapologetic.
“I don't want to go on Broadway, I want to just stay home and eat chips.” Mackenzie Ziegler, Dance Moms (2016)
I again realised the faults of my bedroom during the HSC, when I spent the entirety of my study break bed-bound with a fractured ankle. It was through this experience that I realised I wouldn’t have done it differently, minus the fracture. I grew larger on that bed, hunched over excessively colour-coded Google Docs tables, eating every meal backdropped by Jetlag: The Game (2022). My ankle eventually healed, undeterred by my lack of effort toward physio exercises, and with this, promises of a room makeover flew by, whipping me like the passing days of adolescence.
Like a virus creeping over, I grew restless with the decor. Fishnet tights spilled out of a half-open drawer and pink, floral backpacks crammed on a shelf. Cans of hard apple cider were hidden away in a toy box boasting the primary colours. I would sit hunched underneath my bright pink Pororo blanket, my face illuminated by the gain levels of my MiniFuse interface, singing about the boys who weren’t over their exes. Often, I would come home to find the aftermath of my pre-party why-is-every-item-of-clothing-I-own-black panic; a trail of garments covering the floor and my bed. Still tipsy, I’d move the black mass of clothes from my obnoxiously pink bed sheets, and climb into my blankets’ embrace, laughing at the irony of this dichotomy.
At some point in the summer between high school and university, I deep cleaned my room. The change was small, but revolutionary. I sorted through hundreds of papers dating back to year 8 geography (I still ask myself: why so many sheets from geography?) and with every pile I carried to the recycling bin, it felt like a weight was parting from my shoulders. I remember seeing my floor for the first time in months. I had really let myself go. Some people clean their room and feel normal, but I cleaned up my room and felt different. It was unsettling to see clean surfaces and neat piles, the tidiness was not what I was used to. I longed so strongly for my room to be rid of everything, including the clothes that were ‘to be donated’ and all the toys that were ‘to be gifted’, among others. I was deeply sick of my room; my whole world revolved around my bed, and I hated it.
“I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere.” Charlie Kelmeckis, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
I don’t remember the day it happened, but after I started university, something inside of me switched. I no longer wanted to spend all my time in my room. In fact, I didn’t want to be home at all. I found myself almost always choosing to make the hour-long commute to university just to sit at a table and study, as opposed to multitasked study while scrolling half-laid out on my bed. The consolation I received from a good laugh had gradually outweighed the comfort of endless bedrotting. The luxury of falling onto that soft bed became just that - a special gift at the end of a very long day. My world tessellated in front of my eyes. My bedroom began to feel less familiar and more… like a room with four walls. And some Canva posters. And a guitar.
***
Yesterday, I packed my dusty Lego sets into a big plastic container and vacuumed the surface they sat on. I’m not going anywhere; I just want a change.