William's Confinement

    Once the door was closed, and any recent visitor was seated quietly, the only sound that was heard from this corner of the house was the Grandfather clock’s endless clicking in the kitchen below. If it were any especially windy night, the usual creaks and groans of a home of this age might be noticed, except, those kinds of familiar reverberations get ignored in everyday life –accepted, as if they are somehow internal.
          Rain, too, could make this same type of inner banter, and it often would as it struck the glass of the wooden framed windows in this room. This was the kind of glass that, if you stared at it long enough, you would notice how it had slowly dripped down over the great length of time that it had been here. The bottom half of the window was visibly thicker than the top half, causing a warp in the way anyone perceived objects through it. Images appeared stretched, distorted, and surreal. The view down onto the back lawn from up there was fuzzy, blurry, and dizzying, while the view of the sky above was bright, clear, and optimistically inviting.
           The old wooden floor in this room was well swept, as if someone had recently attempted to clean it. Despite this apparent effort, it was still permanently stained in the cracks and crevasses from all the many generations of dirty feet that had scuffled across it. There was a familiar comfort in these ghostly trails throughout the upstairs of the house that left one feeling lonely, missing the action that must have gone on there. There had been a procession of activity on these floors, kids running across them, sliding down the stairs, climbing into bed, or jumping off of it, running from room to room, slamming doors, screaming, giggling, crying and laughing. All that was done here had been done before, and before, and before, somewhere in time, by families whose lives now lay hidden in the long history of the home. The upstairs of the house still held a part of all of them in its wood, in the cracks and crevasses, and in the scuffs, scratches, and markings on the walls. They were all still there, somehow.
         The room saw no sunlight in the mornings. They were always dark, cold, and often felt quite wet. There would be a dampness in the air that would chill all bones and feet incessantly. By mid-afternoon, however, the sun would start to sparkle in, lighting up the dreary back gray wall, starting at the ceiling and slowly rolling downward, until the sun reached the floor in the corners. Eventually, the room would all light up with a luminosity slightly perverted by the disfigurement of the window’s glass. By noon, reds, yellows, greens, and blues would cascade rainbows across the floor and walls. This would only last until the sun moved past the window. Then, all that remained was shadows.

             In the night time, there would be a glow that would come in from under the door-frame, if the hallway light was left on. It would mark the only way out of the room. Without that hallway light on, the room was quite pitch black and one could easily get lost, even in a room as small as this. Most of the walls of the bedroom were blanketed in various paraphernalia, such as macabre, horror flick posters and life-size Goth music-moguls.

            The wall with the window in it was set aside for pictures cut from magazines, books, and CD covers. Because of the wall’s morning moisture, most of the taped pieces had half-peeled off. What was probably once a grand mosaic of carefully chosen images now hung in tatters, its general theme lost in the disintegration. It had been a black and white collage of  writer's faces with a colorful rainbow over the top. Now, all the people's faces were torn and indistinguishable and the rainbow was collapsed and hanging off the wall in the middle.

         Under the light switch next to the entrance door was another collage, this one of photographs. It was made up of high school friends that had exchanged snapshots. All the kids in the pictures were wearing deathly white make-up, black eye shadow, and multiple face piercings; except for the image of one of the girls. She was maybe fourteen and sported high-school pretty, shoulder length, strawberry blond hair. Her eyes were a blue that held a distinct, chromatic purity, and she brandished a cheerleader’s bright, organic smile. Unlike all the rest of the photographs in this collection, this one had been cut from a yearbook.
        Propped against the same wall as the photographs was a large wardrobe. It sat open. Black clothing hung inside, organized into clothing categories: pants, t-shirts, collared shirts, hoodies, and finally, a long, black, leather, trench coat. This bulky jacket took up at least a third of the inside space of the wardrobe. It was so long that its bottom half hung out, making it so the doors could not be closed while it remained inside. 
        A reading desk sat facing the window. It had been crudely painted a dark mauve color, but portions of its underbelly had been missed, and the previous coat of pink enamel paint could still be seen in certain spots. Drawings, cut-up magazines, poem scribbling, and an open, large, leather-bound journal littered the top of the desk’s writing surface. A jar of pens, and pencil crayons had tipped over across the back of the desktop, scattering the writing utensils everywhere. Some were on the floor, while others were jammed between the back of the desk and the wall. A number of the pens had exploded, leaving multiple globules of colored ink drying on bits of magazine, and some on the blue leather cover and inside paper of the writing journal. 
      A bed and a bedside table were shoved against the wall opposite the window. The bed had been made with an almost military perfection. A patchwork comforter was meticulously tucked into the top mattress, leaving perfectly lined creases where it enveloped the pillows beneath. A single, solitary teddy bear had been placed in a seated position, propped up against one of the pillows. It was an old, well-worn bear missing one of his arms and one of his eyes. The fur was a dark chestnut, except for the ears. They had changed to a light hazel, as if someone had sucked on them until the original tint had faded. 
        There was a perceptibly pungent odor to the room, kept prisoner there by the lack of airflow. The scent seemed to contain all the putrid qualities of apple cider vinegar, decaying meat, and sour goat’s milk. By moving around the room one could easily deduce the source of the stench. It was the bed. With as much energy as someone had apparently put into making the bed, it seemed they had decided not to wash the sheets or the blankets. If one examined the situation more closely, they would then realize the smell actually originated from the mattress. Years of bed-wetting in a damp, dark room had left it rotting from within.
          Sitting, quietly in the room, on the edge of the manicured bed, breathing in the bilious odors and scanning the contents of the room illuminated by the sun’s last rays of the day, one ponders its secrets. Here, among its components would be the answer to its morbid state of decay, left frozen in time. A piece of this room could have been the catalyst in the long hours, days, and months that one particular boy had spent up here. From the long, sinister trench coat protruding from the open wardrobe, to the sadness of the decrepit teddy bear, the bedroom all seemed lost in ailing thoughts, a reflection of a mind’s eye turned to foul and concluding visions. 
         On the desk, in the open journal, are some answers to the room's questions. Seated, facing the skewed view of the outside world, eyes could read the words written on the open page. They are written by a hand that had pushed the tip of the pen deep into the lined paper, scarring numerous pages beneath. This daily journal ended three months previous. The final pages read as follows:

July 4th 2002
Dear fucking diary…
fuck you all! today is going to be my day! i have got my dads gun, and i’m coming to school to use it. all of you that pushed me or looked down on me or stole from me your all going to get it. you too brian. you said you were my friend but you took lisa and you knew how much I liked her. you are the worst of all. you are all going to be sorry.
                                    

July 6th 2002
i said i was but now i still havnt. what am i waiting for? maybe I am the piece of shit everyone thinks i am. maybe i really am a chickenshit. my mom seems to sorta care but maybe she just has too. i mean she is my mother. i love her and all but what else can I do?
                                    
July7th 2002
i cant do this anymore. so much of what i try never seems to work and no one likes me. billy and bobby and ted and all those other kids were all my best frends back in junior high and now they don’t like me anymore. just because i dress different? just because the girls don’t like me? we were always best frends like that time we all went up to Rosedale on our bikes and I fell off mine and i hurt my leg. they carried my broken bike for me all the way back to home. we were frends then.and now? now they all sit on the other side of the cafetria and look at me like im sum kind of animal. they don’t talk to me in the halls and they don’t like me. i cant take this. i hate them.
                                    

July8th 2002
today is it. all by myself like i started my life I will end it. no one else just me. me in my room that always was my faverite place to hide. i see the sun set from here and I will set here too. im sorry mom. i know you loved me but it was not enough. goodbye.
                                    - William

         And here the journal ends, all the following pages left blank. All there is now is a boy’s room, left alone by a saddened mother. She is afraid to enter here and clean up what was left behind, afraid to become part of its past, feel the ghosts of its history. The room of many boys, this one was lost in self-estrangement and isolation. This room was William’s confinement.