take me to the end so I can see the start...

I’m reading this book by Anne Lamott called “Bird by Bird”. It’s a book mostly about writing and how she teaches creative writing, but she puts things in such a way that it is about so much more. I read something this morning in it that struck me…she said, “Every room is about memory. Every room gives us layers of information about our past and present and who we are, our shrines and quirks and hopes and sorrows, our attempts to prove that we exist and are more or less Okay” (74).
This got me to thinking about what the things we display have to say about ourselves, our lives, our priorities. I got to thinking about my room at my parent’s house. Since I’ve moved out, I haven’t changed it a bit. It’s a little time warp/black hole from my high school self. And I like it that way. I like to sometimes go through my desk drawers looking for things I forgot about…a cap gun, a birthday card from a friend, a keychain I bought on a class trip. Each of these outwardly meaningless little things release a flood of memories for me. Sometimes I’ll lay in bed and look at the posters and papers that are on my walls, and I’ll remember why I put them up and what my frame of mind was when I did so, and what they meant to me…the kind of things you can only know by looking back. I’ve learned more about my high school self by spending one afternoon in my room, than I knew about myself my entire high school career.
And then I began to think about my house in Edmonton. About my room there, and more than that, about the way my roommates and I have “decorated” our house as a whole. Each of our rooms are so different…everything between Louise’s “everything has its place, clean lines, made bed, pictures at right angles” room to Janina’s well meaning chaos of clothes and blankets and paper mixed with splashes of color and culture and windows into other worlds from Manila to Smithers. My room is a mixture between these two…everything has its place, it just usually chooses to end up somewhere else. Pinned to my walls is everything from flags and pictures that curl at the corners to a Team Espana t-shirt, a gigantic world map and handmade paper. Perhaps I’m still too close to really be able to think about what they all mean to me and what it says about me that I’ve chosen these particular items. And what I choose to bring back from Bangladesh and incorporate into my room will say something else again, something new, something that gives insight into a new phase of my life spent here.
And traveling is a different sort of experience…when all you have is temporary places to “set up house”. At the moment, my walls are bare except for a embroidered picture left by the previous inhabitant years ago, and a newspaper clipping about the extinct status of the rat-squirrel (which always makes me laugh and says something about Ali, who had my room last, and left it up for my enjoyment). In a situation like this, what does my room, which really displays nothing that is intrinsically mine, have to say about me? I began to think that maybe it isn’t so much what I display so much as what I chose to bring with me that says something about me: pictures of my family and friends, Canadian flag stickers, an obscene amount of books (according to my mom), a pair of old jeans, a picture of a fish drawn by my nephew, a book of matches. I don’t know what this says about me or what I will remember about these things a year, a decade from now. But I take notice of these things and collect these thoughts not with the conscious decision to learn something about myself, but as a record for my future self to be able to look back on and think about and understand me more deeply than I can know myself in the moment.