I stare around my room and I can see times gone by. The double-shelf table in the far left corner carries volumes of textbooks through the years. Five years. On the top sits binders full of Thatius. He’s a vampire and at least 8 years old by now. I’m no longer 16.
The dresser by the table bears a semester’s worth of returned homework and the week’s laundry. The dresser’s broken. Its drawers finally collapsed three months ago. It should be as old as Thatius.
The laundry basket by the door is empty save a few napkins at the bottom. Don’t ask me how they got there.
My 14-year-old sister has also created a corner of her own, which eats three winter jackets and counting.
Sternly watching the feast is my backpack. It splits the Red Sea—or my blankets, separating bed from closet. And it has every right to do so, for purses and empty shopping bags could have drowned below. They beckon at the headboard’s feet. It is shorter than me by three inches and is three arms across.
Elsie Dinsmore and Millie Keith sit with a top view. Their companions are a glass doll, a hand-made teddy bear and nine-patch quilt, two 9-inch doll dresses—made by hand as well, a band-aid box for the accidents, a collection of buttons in a re-used alfredo sauce jar, a wooden buggy that seats a bear and bunny figurines, unused perfume bottles—not even by me, a graduation cap, a mini-notebook that signifies my brother’s love, and two Ericson Elementary Perfect Attendance awards.
Making the headboard their home are more awards, along with several photo albums of high school friends, tissue and lotion, Corduroy (for the real Lisa), a high school diploma and year book, a “piggy” bank, and a world of vampires, witches, and demons trying to overcome Lord Voldemort.
Two boxes of Standards-met sit by the window. They are lightly filled after two year’s worth of hard work in Elementary Education. Unfinished books tell them to keep quiet, and a handy-dandy lamp as old as me triumphs over a sea of books to say:
A dirty room is an active room!
*Written after a centipede danced across my bed sheets (Ahem, I’m sitting in bed.)
Written by: Lysa Shimkus, circa 2005