Memory Space

I went to a weeklong writing retreat years ago. One of the exercises we did was to imagine a house full of rooms that we could go to anytime we liked just by closing our eyes. Each room could have any function, purpose, décor, or reason that we liked. In a way, each room was like a different story that we could tell. And some of the rooms were hiding places for bad memories. We could open the doors if we dared, or keep them closed.

I don’t remember why we did this exercise. But I do remember some of the rooms that I envisioned. One room had angular white couches with red pillows and a white marble fireplace. Another room had high ceilings with blue-green walls and long white scarf curtains that were blowing in from an open window. I’d never been in rooms like these, but when building them in my mind, these were the details that popped up.

Fourteen years and two states later, I rented a space to use as a writing office. I got the space dirt-cheap because it needed some work. I had a hole in the ceiling repaired. And I had electricity installed. Then I got a chandelier at a Habitat ReStore for ten dollars that I had installed on a dimmer switch. I cleaned. I painted.

I started painting some of the woodwork to brighten it up—which is something I almost never do because I love wood tones and can’t stand covering it with paint. But the finish on the old wood had aged to a dark brown patina. I cleaned it but it just looked drab and dirty. So I spent 20 minutes with the white paint bucket to see what one section would look like, when the owner stopped by and told me not to paint the wood. For those 20 minutes of painting, I spent more than a week stripping the paint, which turned into a month of stripping the finish from the rest of the woodwork so that it would all match. The woodwork turned out much lighter, with pink and blue grains visible in it. I applied a clear finish to seal it. In the end, my new writing office had blue-green walls and high ceilings and a long, white scarf window treatment.

Funny how you can create something in your mind that sticks with you, and then you can make it happen in real life.

Funny, but that’s what writing is, after all.