The Room
by Konrad Albright

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Nancy glanced about the room. “Almost done,” she thought with a smile.

It had been nearly ten years since she’d moved out of this room the first time, just after high school. The room had been clean and orderly up until her first few months of college. Things began to become cluttered as she started spending more and more time with friends and going out to parties. Eventually, when she decided to move out, she had just ransacked it in an effort to grab everything that was important to her new place, leaving behind the remnants of her childhood scattered about.

She had tried on several occasions when visiting her parents to clean things up, but each time tragedy struck and she’d been forced to return home with more clutter than she’d left with. “Junk piled upon junk,” Nancy thought, reflecting on the past.

After her father passed a year ago come January, and her mother felt lonely, she decided to exit yet another bad situation and move back in with her. “Oh Lord! How am I going to do this? I don’t even have anywhere to put my bed! I’ve got to get this place cleaned up first,” she had told herself time and again!

Slowly but surely, Nancy removed junk while sorting out the stresses of everyday life. It was taking her nearly two years to truly dig deep into the mess and determine what she really needed to keep and what she could do without. It was taking her nearly two years of virtually living out of her car, barely having any space outside of her bed, in which to move. She continued to reflect on how the state of this room in which she’d never truly moved out of, began to parallel her life. After high school her life had lost a lot of organization and structure and turned into clutter and chaos. Her thoughts continued, “…so much drama, so many poor decisions, so little forethought about anything…”

Nancy sat down in her reading chair. The moon was beginning to shine through the window. She continued to muse, “I’ll be damned if this little room of mine wasn’t the cause of it all!” She chuckled, but immediately closed her eyes looking serious for a moment.

Nancy’s meditation suddenly began to race into a whirl of revelations. “Sometimes my clutter and chaos would move around somewhere else for awhile and I could resolve a bit here and a bit there; but then it would all get dumped back on me – right on top of what was left of the other junk that was still here.” Then her insight into all these past scenarios began to focus as if she were chanting a mantra, “rinse – repeat – rinse – repeat – rinse – repeat!” Nancy burst into laughter again, finding humor in the insurmountable odds that seemed stacked against her ever moving away from home over the years. It seemed that each time she had thought that she would never return, fate would put her right back into this tiny, little room.

“Now my life is starting to regain order again,” she began to contemplate; “and sure enough if my room isn’t almost as clean as it’s ever been! I guess there is something to what people say about our environment having a direct effect on our lives.” Nancy began to think she may be on to something, even if only half-serious about the entire thought process bubbling through her head. After all, she had not been in the room when she was away.

Then another revelation hit her. “Even when we're away from it, yeah, this wasn't my environment anymore; but I left an unresolved mess here! Whenever I came to visit, it was still here to look at, and getting messier and messier as Mom started piling her junk in here, too! I'd see the mess here every time I came to visit, symbolic of all my unresolved issues that I’d left behind me.”

The phone rang, interrupting Nancy’s contemplation momentarily. It was her mother.

“Yeah, that’s fine, Mom. I’ll probably be asleep when you get home, so I’ll talk to you more about how things went with Karl when I get up tomorrow. I love you, too.” She smiled. “I’m glad that Mom is getting out there and having a good time and moving on with her life,” she thought. “I like Karl. He’s a nice guy. I hope they hit it off.”

Nancy sat back down and began to smile, thinking about her mother’s role in this. “It's funny how Mom keeps bugging me about helping her clean the rest of the house and do this and do that for her, and I keep telling her that I will help her more – once my room is done!" Nancy laughed out loud again. “I think maybe I was semi-conscious of this thought, of how my room has reflected my life, all this time. Maybe this isn’t really breaking news!” Truly, she had committed to herself that there would be only a snowball’s chance in hell that she would begin truly tackling the rest of the house until the room was done.

“I knew this, because I knew I would not have the patience or mental clarity to truly help, so long as my room – my life – was in disorder!” Nancy’s thoughts were now being spoken aloud, as she got up from her chair and began to put her scattered belongings away into empty spaces of shelves and drawers and cabinets. “Slowly as I have been resolving things in my life, the room is getting clean. It's taken me an eternity, but it's getting done.”

A few hours passed, and a final glance around the room revealed a very cozy and simplified living quarters, no longer cluttered with items deemed outside of necessity. Many of the old memories had been tucked away out of sight, others out in plain view, and some had been removed entirely to the trash. She had no regrets, however. The room was complete, and Nancy smiled with delight.

“I think I'm going to make sure this room never gets dirty again,” she spoke again aloud to herself; “and one thing is for sure: when I move out on my own again, everything's coming out of it! This magical little room can become someone else's headache,” she laughed!