FEELS LIKE HOME

I collapse onto the desk chair, tired after a day of classes and walking. Looking around the room, I feel alienated, wondering why two weeks of living here have not made it welcoming. It gives the appearance of a hotel room where I am only temporarily residing, with barren walls and a lonely pinboard. I know part of this is my fault; I have been putting off decorating the room, feeling hesitant about personalizing it, to trust it with my pictures and my memories. But now, the lack of me-ness is suffocating.

I open my laptop and put my playlist on shuffle, to drown the thoughts that stop me from taking action. The folders which contain the pictures I printed in India are kept deep inside the clothes cabinet and I fish them out, bending my arms at odd angles. I make space on my table to place all the pictures and posters and see which ones should go on which wall. Deciding to make the wall between the desk and the window a K-Pop shrine, I start sticking photocards and polaroids of BTS and Blackpink. Each member should have the same number of pictures on the wall (equality), and they should be distributed in a way that two pictures of the same member shouldn’t be close to each other. It takes me forty-five minutes to have all their pictures up on the wall, and the asymmetrical, collage-like feel of the decorations is already comforting.

I move to the wall right opposite it, to put up pictures of my family and friends. Picking out my favourites from the lot, I put up the rest on the wall. I stand back to admire my work, smiling at how diverse the group of people on my wall are. I have my childhood friends (people I don’t talk to anymore but remember fondly) and friends I made in the past five years who hold a special place in my heart. There is a childhood picture of my mother, where she looks remarkably similar to me, standing next to my grandparents. A group picture of my family from years ago, when we went to a restaurant to celebrate my mother’s PhD award makes me nostalgic. Pictures from a visit to the zoo, when I was three are scattered about - these are pictures from the time I used to still smile with my teeth, instead of hiding them.

Before I put up the pictures on the pinboard, I decide to place my Harry Potter posters to cover up any big empty spaces on the walls. Two of them go up next to the window, one above the radiator and one right by the entry door, which says, ‘No Muggles Beyond This Point.’ I sit back down on the chair, putting a pin through the pictures before fixing them onto the board. I stare at a picture of me and my best friend enjoying McDonald’s cold coffee (back when it still tasted good). The picture is from my birthday party, where I gave her the tomatoes from burger because I don’t like tomatoes. After I put it up, my gaze falls on a snapshot of my niece standing on a victory stand after her first Sports Day in pre-nursery. She won a medal that day and wouldn’t stop talking about it. I pick up a picture of my grandaunt with my mom, her sisters and me, posing at her son’s (my uncle) pre-wedding ceremony. We are all wearing yellow, and we look so happy. I have been to many weddings, but this was one of my favourites. There is a picture of my grandfather smiling at something I said, while my mother and aunt laugh, from a visit to Agra almost ten years ago.

I spend the next hour just going through the pictures and placing them on the pinboard. Checking the time, I realize I spent four hours just decorating my room and start cleaning up, when a packet falls to the ground. I pick it up and see that it is full of glow in the dark stars. Not wanting to waste them, I add them to the K-Pop wall, in between pictures. They need sunlight to recharge, so it’ll take them a few days to start working, but they add to the beauty of the wall.

As the adrenaline of decorating faded, my body feels heavy. But I cannot go to sleep just yet because I have a pre-reading task for tomorrow. I try to focus and when I start to feel my eyes close, I look at the pictures behind the laptop on the pinboard and see the faces of my family smiling back at me, which energizes me to keep going. It’ll probably take many more weeks of living here, but the change of scenery from white walls to pictures of the people I love and adore is definitely a step towards making Room A feel like home.