My Blue Cave

Three years ago, I updated my bedroom. I painted the walls, the ceiling, and the bookshelves. My mom and I replaced all the vital organs of bedroom furniture; I got a new bed, a lounge chair, a new desk and chair set, and even new blinds. An electrician installed a more attractive light fixture. Only the ratty blue carpet stayed the same.

Our house is approaching thirty years old and the blue carpet in the upstairs bedrooms has lasted all of those years. I don’t know why anyone would install a blue carpet, especially this shade of blue; thirty years ago, it probably looked like a blue sky with the faintest haze of gray cloud, but now it’s much more cloud gray than sky blue. The heavy traffic areas are brownish. And it has stains. The walls used to be stark white, so the blue carpet gave the room some much needed color, but I intended to make my walls colorful, so I had to pick a paint that coordinated with the stained brownish grayish blue carpet. Eventually I picked “Polar Sky,” a color that harkens back to the color of the carpet in its heyday. It’s a light blue, with hardly any gray at all. It’s all awfully blue, but I like that. I live in a blue cave of the color of the sky.

The room perfectly reflects the conflict between my inner perfectionist and the carefree, careless gremlin that fights for control. The paint job on the walls is great, but since I didn’t tape the line between the blue walls and the white ceiling, there’s some blue paint on the ceiling and some white paint on the walls. The furniture all matches, in color and in style – it even matches the color of the trim – but I’ve covered every available surface with books, clothes, scraps of paper, empty bottles of lotion, old birthday cards, and other teenage paraphernalia. The desk is symmetrically framed by two stately standing lamps, but leaning against the wall, next to a pile of clean clothes I never put in the closet, is a full length mirror. I’ll hang it properly someday, probably before I go to college. Until then, I’ve draped a T-shirt over the top of it so it won’t scrape the paint.

I didn’t like my room very much before I remodeled it. It was a good place to hide all my crap so my mother wouldn’t throw it away, but everything about the room was old and ugly and boring. I originally wanted to remodel it because I thought having an organized and harmonious room would inspire me to organize and harmonize my cluttered life. Unfortunately, my life is still as cluttered and cacophonous as ever, but I love my room now. It’s a constant reminder of the first time I did something for myself, without teachers and textbooks and rubrics guiding my every move. Sure, my mom paid for everything, and she made sure that I knew how to sand and paint and use a screwdriver, and I still haven’t hung that darn mirror, but I other than that, it was all me. I’m ridiculously proud of that.

I’d be even prouder if I could manage to just keep it clean…