Is This How It Ends?

I looked into the dusty bedroom to find it empty. The bed was temporarily moved, the bookshelves gone, and everything hung on the walls and ceiling were dismantled and relocated someplace. Particles from days of sanding danced in the sunbeams and lightly covered the floor as if a small winter shower passed through. “Not bad so far, Dad!”

“Getting there! It wasn’t as bad as I thought getting those drawings scraped off the ceiling,” he responded. It might have been construed as a happy exchange to some stranger walking by, peeking into our lives for one brief moment. This was a space that I hadn’t lived in for over a decade, but was as familiar to us as anything. This was the first time in forever that it wasn’t so much chalk full of my fledgling childhood personality as it was four simple walls and a closet. There were no more painstakingly cut and glued drawings on the ceiling. No more Transformer toys lining shelves. No more train track rounding the top of the room. No more books. No more Enterprise poster. No more tiny house for my childhood stuffed rabbit, Teddy.

It was as if I had never even been there.

But then I remembered just how the room was there for me. It was there when I finally had a place to put my little Transformer collection. It was there when I needed a place to cry after a breakup or when I needed to consider my next move. It was there when I needed to be alone or when I needed a private spot NOT to be alone. A place to be depressed or a place to be manic. A place to grieve. It was where I fell in love for the first time. Where I brought home my pet turtle for the first time. Where I decided I wasn’t a Catholic (or even Christian). Every year I had added and built and morphed the room to highlight what I needed the most and all I needed was four walls and a closet to support those needs.

Yet now I stood looking into a dusty, empty room a decade after and I don’t need those four walls anymore. I left and went on adventures and lived in apartments and hopefully a house someday. I’ve had a few cars to carry me places, girlfriends, and now a wife. I’m more sure in myself. I have direction (I think). I don’t need you anymore: You are now a generic bedroom. A guest might stay here. I myself might sleep here if I needed to, but you no longer encapsulate a person’s existence, his personality, his growth, his fears, worries, and hopes for the future. You are nothing but wood and plaster!

Someday in the not so distant future, this room and house will belong to somebody else. Some other family. Maybe even a little kid who loves Transformers and Star Trek and reading and Trains. Would it be that some other child might lean on this room for security and growth and victories and sorrows in the same way? Was that going to overwrite my own history here as my existence overwrote whatever came before me in this century-old house? I suddenly wished I had taken a picture of the room before its upheaval. Perhaps I could have printed it and hid it in the closet for the next occupant to find. Perhaps the room shouldn’t have been changed at all? 

It needed to change. My childhood was a thing too garish for a prospective home-buyer. They need to see themselves in a room to want to buy it. Not a weird little kid. There is no such thing as permanence or legacy in this universe. Eventually, your mark is erased and forgotten. It might take a year or centuries for the most consequential of mankind, but everyone will be erased and cease. So it didn’t matter when it happened or how or who will come next: These four walls could only support me for so long anyway.

I’m turning 35 years old in two weeks. It sounds so old to say it aloud, but it doesn’t feel that long at all inside. Especially when a room I moved out of still could snap me back to when I was 13 whenever I wanted to visit. Now that luxury only exists in my mind and will undoubtedly fade with time. I never really considered what that point in time might be for everyone when youth finally crawls away and curls up into smaller and smaller recesses of the mind. Is this how it ends for me?