mausoleum
june 2024
In which my childhood bedroom is stripped and bleached without my permission. So I throw a tantrum, obviously. Richard Siken puts it best:
“you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know.”
Landlord white. Hospital grey. Say what you want about the painted-over ceiling stars, because the word for them now is gone. Memories tacked up as a child, washed out in the name of novelty, cleanliness, moving on. You aren’t fifteen anymore, and you haven’t been for a very long time. Your brother tells you that you don’t spend enough time in this house to have an opinion anyway. He’s right — it burns. Your neighbour would tell you that he misses how your walls looked before the whitewash, probably, but it’s hard to tell with him nowadays. Partly because you don’t really talk anymore. Mostly because he’s been dead for a year.
Picture this: a life in increments. Picture a life with the blonde boy, splayed out across the single mattress of your bottom bunk. Look up, look at the sky, the ceiling of glow-in-the-dark stars which you strung up together once, a million years ago. You were like gods at the dawning of the world. Are you still there? It’s 2019. It’s not too late. There are forty-eight blutack stains on the ceiling where your stars were pressed up, and there’s a big dark splodge by the light fixture where the blonde boy tossed a sticky stress ball which wouldn’t come down, and there are twin seed-oil handprints behind your headboard because he read somewhere that oil stains are forever. His hand is a little bigger than yours.
Wrong. All wrong. The memories are monochrome, blackened with grief, and anyway you were kids, and forever didn’t mean the same thing then as it does now. Forever as a child is an endless summer holiday. Forever as an adult is the distance between wanting to be a grown-up and becoming one. You write in non-fiction, and you make it real, so, okay, alright, stop picturing a life and just play the cards which you’ve been dealt in this one. The handprints are gone. Painted over. So is the stress-ball splodge. So are the stars.
A boy dies in April, and you’ve been seventeen for a month, and you understand the second that you read the news that you’re also going to be seventeen for the rest of your life. It’s one of those things, that lifetime event, the small-town tragedy which delineates every soul it touches. It’s one of those things, and it happens, it always happens, but did it have to happen to him?
Three kids die in a car crash and one of them is your next-door neighbour. Three kids die in a car crash and all at once your bedroom becomes a dead boy’s mausoleum.
You vow to never change your room again, to keep it exactly the way it was when he was alive — but you can’t control everything. A speeding car. A bored housewife. Things keep changing and you keep not being there to stop them. Your mother sinks into the space like a summer storm, and all at once the walls are thundercloud blank, rinsed of all life by the gale-force wind. Your friend is gone, your room is gone. You should’ve seen this coming; you didn’t. You never do.
Any more anger and this could become a suicide note — but it isn’t. Not yet. You can’t stop hearing your mother’s voice down the phone that one time when you joked about it: don’t, don’t, that’s the worst thing you could ever do to me. So you don’t kill yourself. But then you get home one day and the vault of memories which you kept of your dead best friend has been painted over in psych-ward white, and you come very, very close.
Enough with the metaphors. You’re writing this in the hopes that your mother reads it, and understands it — the agony, the anger — so mitigation is futile. Wage the war, write the words. All is lost. All is lost. It doesn’t matter that you went in swinging, it doesn’t matter that you’ve been driven kamikaze-insane since the start of this. You’re beaten on the battlefield by a blank fucking wall. Grief and grey paint.
The first worst ever day of your life is the day that he died. The second worst ever day of your life is the day of his funeral. The third worst ever day of your life is when you walk into your childhood bedroom and even the memories are gone, gone, gone, gone.
The dreams of bringing your future partners here and having them scour the wall for traces of who you were before this grief. Gone. The laughter borne of hours spent with friends piecing together the photo-evidence of your sixteen-year-old self. Gone. Your memories, your existence, your childhood. Gone.
Nothing in your life has ever been permanent — you should have seen this coming. You will never be a kid again. There will never again be a room which you were allowed to be a child in. A dozen boarding school dorms, cleared of your decorations, of your name. A house in America, in Singapore, two in Hong Kong, all stripped of any trace that you ever lived there at all. Does this make sense, your anguish? You spend a childhood torn from place to place and that’s fine, it’s fine, it’s the butt of every family joke. Hana complains. It’s all she does. She can’t do change, she cries too much, it’s all very funny, so funny, can you hear how loud we’re laughing?
So, hey. Eighteen years as a punchline and you’d maybe hope that a single fucking one of them would see it coming that Hana-who-can’t-deal-with-change would potentially be a little bit pissed off that the one permanent fixture in her life, the archetype, the childhood bedroom, was stripped and bleached overnight without her permission.
She isn’t given the space to be angry. She’s told over and over again that she’s overreacting, being irrational, being a child. It’s a blank canvas, everyone keeps saying, and anyway, you’re never here.
They laugh about it at the dinner table. She leaves midway through to be sick in her whitewashed bathroom. Even the fucking towels in there have been replaced. She’s talking about this entire thing in the third person, for some reason, because the thought of actually writing a letter to her mother which says I can’t ever forgive you for this or do you have any idea how horrible that was never seems to go much further in her head than a string of words which would be passed around and joked about by the whole family at dinner time. Just like always. They all hate studio laughter in TV shows, and yet.
There’s more to say — I don’t know how to say it. I’m tired. I deserve a childhood bedroom. I deserve a more permanent existence than this. I never wanted a blank canvas: I wanted the room that I decorated at sixteen, I wanted the cove which I created as a kid for the sole purpose of it being a safe place, my place, my one lasting thing. I wanted, at the very least, to be asked before my entire life was stripped from the walls while I was still a hundred miles away.
I don’t know. Bleach-white room, painted-over handprints. That’s growing up, isn’t it? No more mausoleum: not for my childhood, not for the dead boy. All of my anger morphs into exhaustion eventually. Frank: I miss you. And I’m sorry about my bedroom. And the handprints. And the stars.
