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I’m making over my entire room. Every time that I step into it, I get a little sick to my stomach. Coming home this break has been harder than any other. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because in a couple weeks it’ll have been one year since everything associated with home, either inside the house or just a few miles away from it, became a bad memory. I’m painting all the walls red, a deep red, and covering the walls with my black and white photography. It hit me one night, though, to search through my family’s old photo albums to see if I could find anything. It was one of the best ideas I’d had in a long time.
I was sitting on my bed. It was nearing 2 a.m. and here I was thumbing through pictures I had never seen before of my mom and dad before they even got married. A lot of polaroids. I found pictures of mis abuelos. There were pictures of me and my sister from vacations I had no idea I went on with my family. It was a bit of a nostalgic feeling I had running through my heart, but at the same time, I didn’t really know what I missed. And I don’t really long for anything to be the way it used to be. If anything, I wish I had never met him. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t hate home. I wouldn’t be bitter. I wouldn’t be heartbroken. I wouldn’t be broken. Yet, if I hadn’t, I would have never grown up.
I can never decide, when I think about him, if it was a good thing to fall in love or not. I can never decide if he was ever worth it. And then again at the same time, I can never even try to imagine what I’d be or where I’d be if he hadn’t been a part of it. So really, it’s not even worth contemplating. And, I realize that it may be absurd to one who knows no details that one person who’s been in my life for almost four years now can have such an impact on what I consider my past, but in the matter of the first two years that we were together, I went through things a normal 18 year old should never go through.
So here on my bed I sat with a million things running through my mind. I want to paint over my past. Ironically, I’m painting over it and covering it with more past…just not mine. I came across a picture of my mom holding me when I was first born. I had a head of crazy, black hair, let me tell you. She was wearing a pink gown, lying in the hospital bed, and looking down at me smiling. She told me I was an accident. In most cases that wouldn’t be encouraging to hear, but I figure…look at me now. I walked to my mirror and took a look. I looked like shit. My hair a mangled mane which I hadn’t touched all day, wearing a gray t-shirt with a picture of a black oak tree imprinted on it, and a pair of black sweatpants with its bottoms pulled up to my shins. I turned to my side and remembered how I got this thin. In less than a month, I lost 20 pounds due to depression. I was never able to gain it back after my stomach had shrunk. I stared at myself for only a minute and I held up that picture of my mom and me again. I wondered what she thought about when she was holding me at that moment. Was she happy? Scared? I was an accident, right? And don’t people usually try to avoid accidents?
It wasn’t until it was too late that I got rid of possibly the greatest accident of my entire life. I just got rid of it. Like it was trash. Something that my mom could have done, but she didn’t. And now I want a new room. New walls, new pictures, new bed…a new bed because the one that I sleep in every night when I’m home is the one that my accident was conceived. A new bed because the one I wake up in every morning is the one that someone should be waking up next to me in.

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