A Room I Can Enter, But Not Return To

I still pass through my room from my sophomore year. That, I think, is why I struggled to call it lost. Usually, loss suggests distance in some capacity, whether it be through locked doors, demolished buildings or train stations receding through glass. Typically, there is a severing of some sort between a person, and the thing he once loved that he has now lost. Yet, Room 27 offers me no such mercy. I open the same outer door, step onto the same carpeted floor, and for a few seconds, I stand in a place that I once knew with an intimacy reminiscent of my former girlfriend. In thinking about this room and the times spent with her in that space, I am reminded of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoesvsky where he outlines the profound human need to speak to at least one person as fully as one speaks within oneself. This, is what I had with her in that room. It was the place where my thoughts passed easily into spoken word, where a feeling never had to remain trapped within the private chambers of my own mind, where even my internal silence felt shared with another soul. Now, I walk through the room as a visitor on my way elsewhere. My roommate S.'s belongings occupied the surfaces. Now, they are gone too and another life has settled into the space. I can still enter the room. Returning, though, belongs to the world that was left with her.

The room was only one hundred and forty-two square feet: a practical box of plaster walls with abnormally thin insulation and borrowed furniture. My bed faced the door from the upper corner. Beside it stood a nightstand carrying remnants of my past: a photograph of her and myself smiling into the camera and another picture frame holding the lyrics to our song, "Yellow" by Coldplay. Above my saucer chair behind my desk which was next to the nightstand, hung awards and certificates from previous academic writing competitions and other various tournaments. On the platform above the doorway, sat a chess trophy stolen in a harmless campaign of adolescent tomfoolery. Yet, none of these objects gave the room its character. Rather, that was derived from the ambiance. As evening approached, I would turn on my blue LEDs alongside my red lamp lights and the orange sunset lamp that fell across a stuffed koala bear, one that I received from her for my 16th birthday so I could have a physical connection with my hometown: Brisbane, Australia. Outside my large window, the grass would darken and the trees would gather their shadows as J. Smith, the dean's office, stood in the distance. Inside, the room would glow.

I have come to think that human beings sanctify places through their repetition. We arrange lamps, frames, chairs, and habits, and then slowly we mistake this routine for permanence.

Scent matters to me more than most people understand. Part of this comes from vanity, the ordinary adolescent desire to present oneself well. But, part of it comes from my culture. As a Pakistani Muslim, I grew up around the idea that fragrance carries dignity. Perfume in Islam accompanies prayer, hospitality, cleanliness and care for the unseen atmosphere one brings into a room. I loved that art long before I knew how to teach it to others around me. For this reason, I choose scents the way some may choose music, according to the weather, mood and the environment I hoped to create. It's no surprise then, that during the winter my room often smelled of vanilla, caramel and wood notes. Memory, I think, respects scent with an extreme sense of loyalty. Images in our mind fade into outlines. The voices lose their sharpness, but a scent can cross years intact and return carrying an entire season behind it. Even now, certain warm notes bring back Exeter snow outside the window, red lamplights on the wall and the certainty I once felt when She sat at my desk doing homework and we spoke about our respective days while listening to Coldplay.

That certainty expressed itself most beautifully on my sixteenth birthday. I was woken up by my good friend Z., who had asked me to get breakfast at Me & Ollie's, a nearby coffee shop. Upon my return to my room, I was caught off guard as my eyes were drawn to balloons scattered across the floor. As I waded my way further into the room, I noticed paper snowflakes hung on the wall opposite to my bed that mirrored the blankets of snow outside. My friends, who at this point had not yet announced their presence, entered the room loudly behind me blowing party horns and opening cans of confetti. Then, She stepped through from the inner room, at that time belonging to my roommate and friend J., and handed me a bottle of cologne. I remember the gift, of course: Nitro Red from Dumont, known for its sweet watermelon note. Yet, I remember something deeper that I had internalized: Love often reveals itself through the currency of attention. Someone studies your habits closely enough to know what would delight you. Someone notices the details by which you express yourself and responds to them with attention and care. At that age, I took moments like this as evidence that the joy that I had once achieved had discovered a permanent address in the streets of my brain.

Life, however, has little interest in preserving our early theories. Nine months later, She chose a new chapter of her life, one with my absence, and the room changed soon after. I first understood that change two weeks later. S.'s clothes lay across the floor. The rug that once anchored the room, I had moved it to the basement of the dorm. Furniture in Room 27 had been shifted, though the larger alteration of the room occurred elsewhere. The order of the room had been withdrawn. The laughter that once would echo in the walls, and find itself into J.P., my neighbour's room due to our paper thin walls had retired.

I used to think betrayal injures the heart alone. Boy, was I wrong. When someone close to you acts against the person you believed them to be, they damage three structures at once: your image of them; your image of yourself as judge of character; your image of the world as a place that rewards sincerity. In that wintry season, another illusion died within me. I had believed that love depended chiefly on feeling and chemistry. The months after, I realized that the pain I was feeling possessed an austere intelligence as it taught me to look for steadier qualities within people: loyalty and emotional maturity. Yet human life would be unbearable if loss were its only craft. The room now belongs to another era of my life. My friend C. now spends his nights there. We watch movies, play board games, and argue over rounds of Imposter.

For a while, I called this new life a replacement. The word felt wrong each time I used it. Replacement insults what mattered by pretending equivalence. Nothing worthy of memory accepts duplication. A wiser word to use would be addition. The earlier room remains preserved in the chambers of memory and in whatever traces affection leaves behind. This newer room, within Room 27 has established its own definition. Perhaps, this is the trial one must go through to achieve maturity. Perhaps, mature adults stop asking life to restore what time has taken, and begin asking what can still be built with what remains.

So yes, I enter that room often. I open the same outer door, step onto the same carpeted floor, pass C.'s monitor and continue into the room where I live now: Room 27 B. Each visit reminds me that places can survive the versions of ourselves that once animated them. Some part of my younger life remains in those walls: a little cologne in the grain of the wood, the echo of party horns, winter light on the floor, the memory of two people talking as though speech itself could keep the world they built intact.

Now, I must carry the rest forward.