Description Exercise - My Room
I lived in a pantry.
To be fair, that's hyperbole. To be fair-er, it's only a little bit stretched beyond the truth.
The room was a pantry at one point, or supposed to be, but we asked the builders to leave out all of the shelves so we could use it as another room. So it's a small room, not a pantry; and anyway, I live in the house, not the room, so even if it were a pantry, my opening remark would be disingenuous at best—but then, it got your reading to paragraph three, didn't it?
These days it looks like a tidy game room, with a row of media shelves on the left-hand wall, and small bits of storage here and there, mostly my girlfriend's things piled in the corner before she departed back to California, a necessary journey for which we are all very consolatory, my family and I are.
I work and sleep here, so I've a small desk, and a futon rolled up to one side because leaving it out flat isn't an option. Not enough space. Every morning I roll it up and every evening before sleep I unroll it again. The desk has to be pushed out of and into the corner, respectively.
Note: I believe I completely failed at conveying the essence of the room. I have a lot of blather about details that are more about me than about the room, which is arguably better, but I don’t feel like I’ve portrayed the room as it is, and that was the purpose of the exercise. Normally, when one writes about something with which he’s intimately familiar, it’s easy to find things to write about. Depth comes from the natural fact of one’s experience, which is what we’re writing about.
In this case, however, I found myself struggling, and maybe it’s because I don’t actually know what the essence of my room is. Is it just the smallness? The compact, cluttered but clean space? The spatter-textured, tan walls contrasting with the medium-toned, cool-gray vinyl flooring? The 65’’ television on the TV stand that dominates the right wall? The small wooden desk, hand-made by Pop, sitting in front of the collapsible plastic table that my work laptop and monitors are on? Does the room feel like a game-room, a work-space, or a pantry pretending to be a respectable living space?
I don’t bloody know.
And now my note about the piece is longer than the piece. What a miserable, no-good, despicable failure of a—
