The ‘stuff’ that made my four walls feel like home from home
It can be easy to forget that a room is a blank canvas before we make it our own. Four walls, a lick of paint or a splash of colourful wallpaper, and that’s it. To start with at least. But it can quickly become a place overflowing with ‘stuff ’.
Coats hanging from door hooks, wardrobes packed with outfits for every occasion. A bookcase can go from just a piece of hastily assembled furniture into a story of its own.
That period where you tried to get into Japanese detective fiction; your increasingly expensive Brandon Sanderson addiction; the graphic novels you forget you owned; that single solitary volume of One Punch Man bought as a piece of retail therapy on a gloomy day in Hertford.
The stacks of old box sets bought in the years there wasn’t a new streaming service each time you turned a corner. A Hoover packed away so well you had completely forgotten your girlfriend had bequeathed it to you when she moved out. The almost comically large TV that takes up so much space. It was practically your only company in the days of the pandemic when you couldn’t rise from the bed.
In four years you have turned this once empty room into a place you call a home. It is full of memories, good and bad. Plenty are related to the love of your life, the early date where you kept each other company while working, that first kiss.
But now all of that is being stripped away and dismantled. The bookcase is empty, the hardbacks and paperbacks now calling cardboard boxes home instead. Those outfits, all bar a few, folded and packed.
The memories linger, but will eventually fade as time chips away at them leaving only brief outlines, like a hastily drawn caricature.
One day, when you are settled elsewhere, you won’t recall the colour of the wallpaper or the carpet. Perhaps you will find yourself remembering the way the sounds of the street occasionally interrupted the quiet of the room. Even that will fade.
Most of the time it can be easy to ignore this, look the other way as it slips through your fingers like grains of sand. But in moments of significance, like packing your life into boxes, it is painfully obvious.