Category: Prose
Theme: Loneliness, Grief
Synopsis: Would I ever accept this room as mine, and just mine? It's too empty without her around
Here I am in my bedroom, typing this short story like a diary entry onto my computer for this assignment. I’m surrounded by light green walls, butterfly stickers plastered around as decor alongside a few picture frames of me, mom, or my family. The clothes I plan to iron tomorrow are lying on what used to be my old bed. I’ve noticed the wrinkles and don’t want to wear them until they’re gone. Speaking of the bed, I haven’t slept on it for two weeks now. My stuff toys basically own the recently changed sheets as if those their property. Except for one, a large SpongeBob plush on my mom’s old bed, which I cuddle whenever I’m sleeping.
It’s spacious too, with two aforementioned beds, a TV, my PC, a couch, a vanity mirror, a door, and a staircase leading directly to it, and still plenty of space to run around. I’ve always been thankful for having such a great room, but something feels amiss about it now. The tacky plastic plants are gone mostly; the only ones remaining are the ones I actually find pretty. There’s less clutter, and I have unrestricted access to Netflix on my TV without anyone to fight with over what to watch. Mom’s bed is mi—
That’s enough for the setting.
Let me tell you what I’m doing right now. It’s 10 p.m., and I’m wearing headphones connected to a shoddy amplifier I should probably replace soon. The volume is at max as I blast K-pop and sing somewhat loudly, which is not an uncommon occurrence in my household. My relatives living with me are used to my night owl tendencies and the noise that comes along with it. I have even told my brother, who is the one paying for my Spotify subscription, about how much I get my money’s worth for the app since I play music nearly 24/7.
Next to me is the mic I bought last year for the pandemic; its base is a lovely hue of emerald green painted onto smooth metal. It works like a charm, thankfully so. I remember that setting the device up took a few hours. I often have fun turning it on and just recording myself singing for the fun of it, pretending I’m a professional despite only having liminal self-taught vocal techniques.
I enjoy and sing mostly pop songs or show tunes from musicals. Whenever I’m satisfied with a recording, I send it mostly just to my friends. In fact, it happens often enough that they tease me about how much I sing throughout the day. “You could probably do a concert and still have breath to sing for another hour,” A friend has told me once.
On top of my headphones is a knitted bunny hat I got online, currently one of my favorites to wear on account of the cold and windy weather (plus, it looks cute as heck). I’m wearing some black sweats and a blue t-shirt. ‘Who doesn’t love warm and comfortable clothes after my night shower?’, after all. Though, things are not what It seems. While I prioritize comfort at home, I go out of my way to wear nice things when going out. This leads to me wearing a lot of clothes, like a metric ton. Thus, laundry afterward feels like an insurmountable task, so much so that I just take them to a laundromat (Another reason is that my hands are really sensitive when overexposed to water).
I buy new clothes often too, usually either online or at thrift shops. I have this unofficial personal rule not to wear something for at least a month after I’ve worn it, so I buy more and diversify my style. I enjoy seeing the changes to my fashion sense, which seem to shift constantly between cute schoolboy and punk-inspired aesthetics, and occasionally something else. Despite this habit, I try to find cheap yet high-quality stuff. My mom can admit that despite the low price tags, I will still manage to find gold within heaps of knock-off designers and breaks-after-two-weeks t-shirts (looking at you, Shein).
I’m inserting a transition here from the pompous ramblings of my silly interests, and now I’ll talk about the rest of my day. I’m writing this after a morning and afternoon of cleaning my entire room. Let me tell you, dust builds up almost as quick as hashtags on Twitter if you don’t clean it enough. The most interesting thing I clean is our drawers. I cleare out any of the multitudes of hoarded things my mom kept but never really had a use for (a tendency she had, which I partially inherited).
Since no one will nag me for it anymore, I only kept the stuff that felt important and threw away the rest. These include my skincare plus haircare, a pair of scissors that we have has for a decade, a new hairbrush we’ve gotten as a gift the past Christmas, mom’s hairclips I might need someday, and some other hygiene stuff like scented shampoos, toothpaste, powder, and the like. Unsurprisingly, within the pile of stuff that can probably be classified as a treasure trove, I find a lot of old trinkets that I completely forgot about. Old jewelry, my old medals, even seemingly mundane stuff, like an old flashlight that I remember my dad using or my mom’s incredibly expired beauty blender.
I recall moments of 5-year-old me constantly playing with the flashlight on the wall to make puppets, then my dad laughing the next day as he replaced the batteries and told me, “No batteries will last long around you.”
The beauty blender is incredibly old, and I told mom it is bad for her skin, but she never got around to changing it. I consider giving her a new one, but she might not appreciate getting one from her son. It bugs me to no end until it iss too late to give one anymore.
I miss both of them dearly.
I nearly cried reminiscing about the memories, especially recalling fond moments with my parents. Cleaning things on my own really set in stone how empty our—my room feels now. It is therapeutic in a sense, but also lonely. My relatives help, yet it still don’t feel the same. It is a calm silence. So serene, and oh-so calming; it is ironically suffocating.
Now it’s been a week of rearranging the place, and while it still looks the same, it’s certainly less homey feeling. I’m used to being on my own here, but this time it just feels different. Not in a good way, in a bad way. Wherein it takes me longer to get out of bed when I wake up, I sleep later than before, and I’m just…less happy.
Maybe my godmother’s recommendation to change the pastel green walls to a fresh paint of yellow might be a good idea. It’s foreign almost; these walls have been the same color since the room is built. We have to sleep downstairs for a month while it is being constructed, but it has always been green. But I got what she meant, the paint was thinning noticeably at parts, and the green has faded to a dull shade. I can’t imagine anything else.
But that might be the point…
Maybe it’s different—no, I mean foreign enough that I learn to disassociate all my sentiments about this room away. Away from seeing her sitting on the bed and watching TV, and the love she shows whenever she asks for a hug, telling me how she wishes that we will never grow up and I can just be her small child again.
Maybe...just maybe I can learn to live here without remembering her every time.
I think this is long enough, I seem to have rambled unintentionally. A lot is kept within these walls, and it is just…relieving to let it all out. Through an outlet that’s my passion first and foremost, writing.
The only real regret I have is my hesitation to show it to her before when she can be beside me and read. I can imagine her whining about the words being such deep English mostly, not gonna lie.
I have written this not for a story, but for a pseudo-diary entry. This is purely mine, probably the only one where I cried while typing the sentences out. It feels weird writing something so personal, speaking as someone use to write cute love stories or comedic melodramas. It’s relieving, however. I guess that’s the magic of this medium, and that’s why I love it the way I do. It’s the path I like to take in the future speaking in terms of professions, but it’ll always be the hobby that it started as in my heart.
This room is mine now…mine only. Yet telling this to anyone who’s reading...it just might make those words less of a burden to bear.
Published by: Alfred Luis Armando
Date Published: March 5, 2023
Time Published: 9:03 am
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