Room one:
Age seven. A kitchen in a house that smelled of woodsmoke and something sweet I could never identify. My mother at the table with her coffee, reading. The light was always coming in from the left. I thought the light was like that everywhere.
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Room two:
The school library, unremarkable, with one shelf of novels no one touched. I touched them. I read them in the wrong order, which is probably the right order, since the right order is the one you actually read them in.
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Room three:
A room I shared with two others in the first year of a city I had moved to without sufficient reason. The window looked out at a wall. Someone had taped a photograph of mountains over it. I don't know whose mountains. I never asked.
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Room four:
A room I barely remember except for the quality of silence it had on Sunday mornings, a specific heavy silence, the kind that feels chosen rather than merely present.
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Room five:
The room where I wrote the first thing I was proud of. I was thirty-one. The chair was uncomfortable and the desk too small and the light inadequate. These conditions, I have come to understand, were probably necessary. Comfort is a sedative.
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Room six:
A room I have not yet entered.
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All rooms:
What strikes me, looking back: how much of my interior life happened in rooms that no longer exist — that have been repainted, repurposed, occupied by other people living other versions of a life. We leave our rooms. The rooms don't leave us. They stay in us at their original addresses, frozen in whatever light was falling through their particular windows on the days we needed them most.