Dear Self,

The room that I grew up in, and the house that held it, are no longer familiar to me in the same way they once were.  It’s not to say that the home I grew up in no longer feels like home, or that I do not feel comfortable in it, or that I don’t enjoy visiting my parents here, I do, but home is different now.

I no longer have the ability to walk blindly across the dark rooms to reach the light switch effortlessly from my memory.  Rooms still sit where they always have, but are situated with different furniture, different smells, different memories.  I no longer find its cold tile, its worn wood grained floors, its drywall spots, or window treatments unmistakably familiar.  

Tonight when I got into my old shower, I recognized the small crack in the bottom right of the tile wall immediately, but I forgot that the temperature knobs work in reverse. That the hot knob is in fact cold, and the cold is hot… And this forgetfulness left me slightly surprised, maybe depressed, but mostly just freezing… I haven’t decided. 

I opened a small drawer that sits beneath my sink expecting to find a toothbrush, and instead discovered a comb that I haven’t used in 5 years.  And as I starred at a single strand of blonde hair still clinging to it, which must have been there since God knows when, I realized I haven’t retreated to this room in quite some time.

I have a room now just down Don Carlos Avenue that I have lived in for almost two years with my two friends. This is where I retreat, where I listen to vinyl records, and try to finish books, leaving my old room to the random guest and family members who visit my parents for holidays or business trips.  Before this room I had another, that sat only blocks from campus in a shabby apartment complex filled with blue collar families and exhausted engineering majors from India.  I had a second story patio attached to my room then, and I remember leaning on its railing, listening to the crickets, and stray cats that communed in the parking lot, and the echoes of voices and clattering glasses that came down the alley from the sleepless bar on 8th street.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that my room is where I make it. If that makes any sense?… I have always found something that flirts on the fence of uncomfortable and satisfied when changing my room, or moving it to a different street, city, or house.  I find moxie, I find pride, and I find uneasiness when conquering the many aspects of change, of life in transition, that seem so frequent in this turbulent yet exciting age.  I wonder how many more rooms wait for me in my life, and if there walls could creak and whisper to me all of the memories I will have within there presence.

Home is where you make it, and I heard somewhere that if you take the world easy, at times, it will take you the same. And somehow, I think these two statements go hand in hand.

Keep the faith and love deeply.

Yours,

Michael