The walls were painted white. When you touched them, ran your hand palm facing against the absence of color, it seemed, it felt, as though some of the white would come with you. Almost dust like. It was always odd to pull away and see the same palm as before, swearing some of the wall had just come off. My palm can still feel that white. Perhaps it did brush off in dust patterns, just not in the ways I thought. I did that quite often, running my hand against those cheap painted old walls. Walls my mother never let me paint a different color. She dreaded any foreseen stressor, like one of her opinionated daughters complaining about a choice she thought was right. God forbid I chose a color and didn’t like it after application. Through this I learned both that homes and rooms are just places, to be filtered through rather than homed and I learned fear of choice. I make choice almost recklessly now, but I am simply a separate person.
I touched those walls so often and it’s not til now that I wonder how stacked lifeless dead wood was supposed to make me feel at home anyways. Did the builders of the structure know that what they believed to be created shelter became my cage? Of course they didn’t. But I do wonder if they ever wonder about what their untied labor later creates. White caging walls. Brittle, able to be toppled by the wrath of god, yet my little fists could do nothing. I suppose I am to be the image of god only, not the strength.
I touched those walls at night, after a long evening of eating honey nut cheerios on the edge of my green bed, watching mindless tv, only able to focus on my visions of perceived joy I would get from emotionless eating and the immediate pleasure I would receive in my brain after regurgitating it only 30 minutes later. Any later and my body might have begun to absorb the nutrients. And god forbid I became formidable in any way. I wanted to be thin and brittle, simply an image. God’s strength never moved me nor my walls. How caged I was by my own person. I remember that joy as much as the sadness that no one would ever hear me. Would know what was happening to me. I was simply a room in another room. It was quiet everywhere and the air always felt thin.
The green on that bed really only served to emphasize the white walls more. It was not mine as nothing ever really was. They were white like paper.