My old room was.......

My old room was messy. Thats’ what everyone who ever saw my old room would say. My room now, too, for that matter. I describe my room currently as “cluttered but not dirty”. My teenager room, though……..yeah, dirty works. Piles of clothes and shoes and papers and the detrius of high school and part time jobs and drama and angst. It was a particularly noxious shade of purple, with darker, even purple-er baseboards. I loved that color. It was like being inside a marshmallow peep, and it gave my parents indigestion, which made it even more appealing. I had a drafting table as a desk, just because I thought that was cool. In reality, it was a horrible desk functionally, with no drawers or places to put things, covered in magazines and old homework and makeup. My bed was a twin (OH! the indignity! I thought at the time a full would be so much more promising, wink-wink), and generally covered with clothes that had to be shoved down to the foot of the bed when it was time to sleep. That was it for furniture. No drawers. For some reason, my family was vehemently anti-dresser drawer, or at least it seemed so to me. There was no manifesto against them or anything, but not even my parents had dressers. My sisters and I had one at one time when we shared a room, but it did not end up in my room when we separated. Cindy would have wanted the drawer, as she was unfailingly neat and organized and tidy, and I would have wanted it and been denied on the basis of doubts I was capable of putting it to good use. I can hear my mother now “you don’t put your clothes in the closet, what makes you think you will put them in a drawer?”. I am sure it sounded totally unfair at the time, but since I currently have both dresser drawers AND piles of clothes all over the room, I forgive her in retrospect. There wasn’t room in there anyway, really.

I had one window, which I never snuck out of. I snuck a boy or two in, but I never left. Somehow my thought process led me to believe that if I were caught with a boy in my room it would be Bad, no doubt, but if I was just missing and they didn’t know where I was……..well, I’d not only have to pay for whatever it was I’d been off doing and also the wrath of the worried parent. Thanks, but no thanks. I was in enough trouble for the things I really did, I was in no mood to get in trouble for all The Things That Might Have Happened. Of course, I say that with ease because I never did get caught with a boy in my room. And no, mom, I won’t tell you who.