When your childhood is spent traversing state and county lines, what passes for a childhood bedroom? What is a childhood home? What is a childhood at all? For me, it is this room in an old, half-haunted house in Live Oak, a Northern central valley town that no one has heard of or cares about. 

The room is painted a sandy brown to remind my grandmother’s dead wife of their honeymoon in Sedona. For me, it is listening to pipes rattle through my closet as someone flushes a shit down the toilet. It is the many move ins and move outs of this house that punctuated periods of change and chaos in my childhood. It is my mother crying on the front porch steps during a manic episode. It is me at eighteen crying on those same steps later, tired and hungry from intentional lack of food, begging for release from this. It is me walking home from my Senior year of high school after the other three years of high school spent out of state, smiling and pink and still feeling the brush of the boy that I like’s hand against mine, listening to City and Colour on my phone. It is me discovering Tumblr on the dining room computer at age fourteen. It is lying in the bedroom that I lived in before this one, when I was thirteen, painted a shining blue, imitating a sky that I rarely went out to see. It is watching That 70’s Show in bed and eating salami sandwiches. It is cutting myself for the first time in the adjoining bathroom when I was fourteen. It is remembering all the versions of myself that I have been in this room over the five years that I spent living here from my Senior year of high school until my Junior year of college, and the next five years that I spent trying to forget, only to wind up right back in this room. It is my love and my hatred of this place, this tiny square footage of brown bland nothingness, wrapped all in one. 

If I listen quietly, over the hum of the train rattling against the tracks about a half a mile away, clamoring its metal cacophony, I can hear the sound of myself breathing, in and out in tandem with the small white fan next to me. I can imagine all of those many versions of myself, from the lonely thirteen-year-old, begging not to move out of state, to the nineteen-year-old, studying for a community college exam, dreaming of transferring to Berkeley or anywhere not here, breathing at the same time, too. If I listen quietly, and I hear their voices, they may say, Thank you. They may say, This is temporary. They may say, It’s okay. They may say, Let go.