Make money doing the work you believe in
The Room
Naida, in a room she will not describe. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
The room had yellow concrete walls, and somebody, sometime, had stuck a row of faded Disney princess stickers along one of them, for a kid, in some other story than the one that happened in there. I'm only going to give you one thing from that room, though. One.
The sheets had castles on them.
Princess sheets. The cheap printed kind, sun-faded, the pinks gone to grey, little crowns and little towers repeating across the cotton. A kid's sheets. Bought for a kid, by somebody, once, in some other story than the one I was in, and then they ended up here, on the mattress in this room, because to the people who ran the machine a sheet is a sheet and bedding is bedding and nobody thought twice about the castles. Nobody had to. That's the whole horror of it, right there. The castles were an accident. Nobody picked them to be cruel. They were just there, under me, in the worst place I've ever been, printed with the daydream of every little girl who ever wanted the story to go the way the story's supposed to go.
I won't tell you what the room was for.
I'll tell you that I looked at the castles. That when I went off to the cool far place behind my eyes, the castles were the last thing my eyes held on the way out and the first thing they found on the way back. That I counted the crowns. Counting the crowns was a thing I could do that was mine, so I did it, over and over, a little girl in a room full of the wreck of being a little girl, counting paper crowns on a sheet because it was the only kingdom left where I got to be the one keeping track.
I was seventeen. I want that said plain, right here against the castles. Seventeen. Young enough that somewhere not far back in my own life I probably had sheets just like these. Old enough to know exactly what the room was, and young enough to still want, underneath the knowing, for the story to go the way the sheets promised. Both at the same time. That's the part I couldn't hold then and can barely hold now. The wanting didn't stop just because I knew better. The little girl who believed in the castles didn't die when the older girl learned the truth. She just had to lie there under her, on the same sheet, and survive her.
This is the shortest thing I'll hand you on the whole road, and I've written it ten times longer in my head and cut it back down to almost nothing every single time, because the room doesn't get more words out of me. The room gets the castles, and the count of the crowns, and the fact that I was seventeen, and then I shut the door on it the way I shut the door on all of it, from the outside, and I keep walking north.
If you've got a kid, go look at their sheets tonight. Not to scare yourself. Just to see them. Just so somewhere a person looked at the castles on purpose, with love, the way they were meant to be looked at, and not the way I had to.
