My Bedroom

I spend a lot of time in my bedroom, so I suppose it reflects  my personality fairly well. It's where I go to read, write, listen to music, do homework... I spend the majority of my time in my bedroom.

 My bedroom is located at the end of my apartment's hallway, so you can see a part of it all the way from the other end of the apartment. The part you can see is my dresser, a medium-sized beech wood piece that came all the way from Ikea. The top of it is almost always covered in the various pieces of flotsam and jetsam that have drifted over to it. At the moment it is home to a charcoal grey fedora, multiple crumpled, used bus tickets, and two records that I acquired yesterday. These are records of Winnie-the-Pooh stories, read by famous actor Maurice Evans, and I found them yesterday afternoon while out for a walk. Passing by my favourite CD store, my gaze happened upon the table out front, which was hosting five cardboard boxes and a handmade sign: "Free records! Feel free to take as many as three!"

I thumbed through them. Not that we have a working record player or anything, but, you know, records are awesome just to have around! Most of them were old jazz artists I had never heard of, but then I found the Pooh stories. There were two of them, "Maurice Evans Reads A. A. Milne's Joyful Winnie-the Pooh" and "More Winnie-the-Pooh Stories Read by Maurice Evans." They were in very good shape, and they had these fantastically amusing write-ups on the back. I left with the first one.

Once at home however, I began to feel... guilty. Who knew how long those two records had been together! And then I came along and separated them. I began to feel almost tearful thinking of "More Winnie-the-Pooh stories read by Maurice Evans" sitting all alone in a box beside the unwelcoming "Country Music for the Easy Listener." My empathy for this poor, now abandoned record went so far that not five minutes later I was out the door again, headed out to rescue it and bring it back to its friend.

Anyway. Putting my random Winnie-the-Pooh record tangent to an end, that would be my dresser.

Tearing your eyes away from the beautiful, faded illustrations of Pooh and his friends on the cardboard sleeves, your gaze would most likely fall upon the opposite corner of the room, my bookshelf corner. Here I have two tall Ikea bookshelves, housing a couple hundred books. The books here have changed over the years, the old making way for the new, but they all are the same in one regard -- they are all in perfect condition. There are no cracked spines, no fingerprint smears on the covers, no dog-eared pages, no squished corners. They are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, and are perfectly spaced, not so tightly packed you can practically hear them crying out in pain as you wrestle them into position, but not so loose that they struggle to stand on their own. Instead, the support each other gently, their covers making that pleasing swish as they rub against each other on their way out.

Beside my bookshelves is my mother's old cello stand, with my guitar on it. I bought the guitar the first day of last summer vacation from a small, independent guitar shop in my neighbourhood, in the hopes of teaching myself to play. I worked on it fairly regularly last summer, but since the school year started I've been too busy to play much. Even though it's just sitting there most of the time, it still adds to the room. It has a lovely, pale wooden front, and deep brown sides, and sits facing my bed.

My bed! I spend a great deal of time on my bed, reading, listening to music, writing in my journal. Most days, getting home from school, it's the first place I head to. I've had it since I was two years old, so it has a couple of bumps on its wooden Ikea frame (yes, my bedroom could be featured in an Ikea catalogue). The covers on it have changed over the years. It started with a Peter Rabbit blanket with a satiny trim I used to have to rub between my fingers each night falling asleep. Over time the satin started falling off in patches, its cool slipperiness disintegrating under my fingers. It was replaced with a quilt embroidered with farm animals, then with a green duvet cover, and now, today, my bed hosts a deep blue duvet with large, white flowers. This specific duvet cover was purchased at... you guessed it, Ikea, during the same trip I purchased the reading lamp that sits on my bedside table.

My bedside table isn't really a bedside table. I mean, sure, it does sit at my bedside, and it does provide an adequate surface to place books, my lamp, etc... but it is secretly a filing cabinet! And no, it did not come from Ikea! Instead, I received it a few years back from my grandparents. It used to be my grandfather's filing cabinet, but they had a big renovation a couple years ago, and decided that they preferred new, modern filing cabinets with tinted glass fronts and stainless steel sliding hinges that even sound modern when the drawers are opened. So the chunky, wooden cabinet with countless scratches and stains came to me. When I got it I was about eight, so I promptly stuffed it full of all of the random pieces of paper I was sure were going to come in handy someday. The top drawer is bursting with who knows what -- I admit that I am almost frightened at the perspective of one day having to go through and clean out all of the incomplete short stories and animal rights article clippings and BC Ferries promotional pamphlets. On the occasion that I do need to find something in there, it's a struggle to open the drawer. The thick stack of papers that I have stuck on top of the files means that I need to tug at the drawer a couple of times to get it to slide open, and when it does it's with a horrible rasping noise as the pieces of paper I could never throw out get caught on the frame in their desperate bid for freedom. Tentatively shifting things around, you can smell the lovely, woody smell of the inside of the drawer, a smell that holds a brief whiff of... pine needles? This can be attributed to the "homemade air freshener" a friend made me in Grade Seven by stuffing a small cloth bag with dirty pine needles -- I threw it in there without thinking, and, like everything else, it has never gone away.

None of that is visible, however, from the outside of the drawer -- it just looks like a perfectly ordinary bedside table, sandwiched conveniently between my bed and my desk. My desk is where I am when I'm not on my bed. My desk is also not from Ikea -- my parents and I found it in an interior design store in Seattle, and I love it. It has wooden sides, curving metal legs, and a white top you can barely see underneath the piles of papers and books and pens. It's right beside my window, which is probably my favourite part of my room. It takes up most of that wall, and from it I have a view of the mountains. Because it lets in so much light I only have to turn my bedroom light on at night, which gives my room a nice open feeling.

So, in short, that is my room. That is where I live.