The moment passed slowly, as if in a dream.
As the door swung towards me, what I saw was like a series of frames, moving slowly, as if suspended in the jelly-like past.
The paper snowflake hanging above my single bed. The faint marks from when I painstakingly turned the ceiling into a glow-in-the-dark starry sky. My small, white desk and the funnily shaped lamp on it. The dent in the wall where I once hurled a Jawbreaker against it. The purple-red flourish on the warm yellow wood of the chest of drawers, from the nail polish flying, swooping out of the bottle as it broke. The faint ink stains on the marble floor from when I used fountain pens to write. The books lined up on the shelves in ascending alphabetical order of the surnames of the authors. Rectangular, blurry halos of blue on the balcony floor, a side product of a spray-painting spree. The round cane chair by the window, where I lay curved against its back, mechanically barreling through books when I couldn’t take the world beyond the window.
In that moment, I wanted to lock myself there, in my room, my refuge through eleven years of my life. I wanted to curl up in the chair by the window, surrounded by my little scratches and dents and my pieces of the world that I had obsessively arranged around myself.
The door swung shut on those blue walls and the green, rain-washed world beyond. As I wheeled my little red suitcase down the hall, I pictured other halls, hours away, and red brick smothered in green ivy. I lifted my suitcase to carry it downstairs. It felt surprisingly light.
