After my parents’ half-joking discussion about what to do with my room when I leave for college, I found myself thinking about the history of my room and its walls. On paper, it’s not very interesting. When I was 3, I “helped” paint my room’s walls white. Days after, I once again “helped” paint the walls pink. A few years later, my parents split, and I painted my new room orange. I guess painting something three times isn’t much of a history—in one year of toddlerhood, I painted parts of the couch in far more than three colors with some Sharpies. As a teen, I’ve managed to paint the ceiling of my father’s house red, yellow, and green with those sticky toy jelly hands you get at the dentist. Yet, I always find myself coming back to the colors on the walls of my room.
The first time I painted my walls, I used a white that was almost the color of untouched snow—so close yet so, so far. Maybe it was not quite white because it covered whatever was there before. I can’t even remember the before color, probably because I didn’t care much for thinking about it. Instead, I clutched my favorite piggy-pink colored blankie and looked forward to the vibrant walls I wanted.
The next color to adorn my walls was, and still is, pink. The same piggy-pink of the blankie I clutched and treasured so dearly. At the time, I loved the color of my walls. I loved it just as much as I loved my blankie or playing “My Little Pony” during recess. (I’d never seen the show, but my friends told me I could be a dragon, so I was all for it.) Over the next few years, my love of dragons, as well as a newfound appreciation for football, knights, and Batman, grew as my interest in “My Little Pony” waned. I played more with “the boys,” although I was a little too eager to please: letting myself get buried in the sand with a bucket over my head, playing the hunter in hide-and-seek, and eating a cucumber of questionable quality that someone tried to grill on the school’s heating vents.
By that age, I think I was 7 or 8, my blankie was so well-loved it started to tear. My grandmother, who was far better at sewing than I was, helped me make a new one: orange on the back and a collage of various yellows and reds on the softer side. Despite my grandmother’s graciousness, I always favored the well-worn softness of the original. The same could not be said for my piggy- pink walls. I started to resent them a little bit, probably because I felt they were “too girly.”
As I grew older, my love for my blankie and girly things started to wear out. My parents’ marriage also wore out. There was no yelling across the house at all hours or accusations of disloyalty.
Instead, there was emotional fatigue, and my mother sleeping in the guest bed. Instead, I was called up to my parents’ room and told that they thought they were better off as friends.
I think I was sad and maybe a little angry over the divorce (I remember crying once or twice), but, at the time, I took it pretty well. After all, divorce meant another home and a new room with not-so-girly walls!
I had my heart set on a disgustingly bright Cheeto-orange for my new room’s walls (in honor of my new blankie). My mother, bless her, managed to talk me down to two Cheeto-colored walls, and two, more palatable, orange cream walls. I will never admit that my mother was right, but my bed is positioned so that I only have to look at the cream-orange walls.
Unlike my younger self, I don’t think I’d ever want to change the color of my walls. Maybe because they are a reminder to listen to my parents occasionally, or because the walls have seen me through my ugliest cries, or because I can’t find my piggy-pink blankie anymore, or because any other color would feel not-quite-right. Or maybe it’s because, no matter what my parents decide to do with my room once I go to college, I know that they’ll never repaint the walls. I’ll always have it as a little history for myself.
