Sitting behind my shoddily built pine desk for hours on end is a part of my everyday life now. Feeling the screws poking out of the wood beneath the desk is no longer a jarring experience when they interact with my leg, leaving scars that stand the test of time. Scraping, scratching and irratating my knee all the way up to my upper thigh, forwards and backwards, as I pull my chair closer or farther.   The sits in the only corner in my square room that isn’t filled by handcrafted dark oak dressers, creaking beds, or blocked by unbalanced doors that screech and pop when opened. It juts out from the wall behind it about two feet to allow me to slip a pale grey office chair between it and the blue-grey walls. The chair fits very snuggly into the nook, so much so that the task of getting the chair out from the corner is cumbersome. The desk is littered with thin paper wrappers with a slender coating of green aluminum and plastered on logos. All the wrappers still have an indistinct scent of whatever flavor of mint was once stored within. Could it be spearmint? Possibly peppermint? 

The desk’s drawer is barely clinging onto the desk. One side of the draw is level while the other side sags so heavily that the slope causes the objects within to slide. The drawer serves its purpose of storing things out of sight very well. The inside of the draw is filled to the brim with crumpled paper and worksheets that I never had the intention of finishing. Flashcards are strewn about the drawer, getting creased and in the way while the drawer closes or finding their way into the pile of endless worksheets. The surface of the drawer is a weak black that has the slightest suggestion of texture, like a failed attempt at sandpaper. The notebooks inside have coffee-stained pages from when I spilled the beverage on my computer and my desk ruining my computer and covering my desk. The coffee seeped into the drawer and marked a few pages with brown discoloration and the smell of coffee. Because of that mistake, every time the drawer is opened my nostrils get hit with coffee. Luckily my baby blue graphing calculator survived the spill, but a few of the buttons stick when pressed.
When the slender calculator is out of place, it sits on the desk’s main surface, to be used at a moment’s notice. Next to the calculator sits a faux deep brown leather writing surface in the middle of my desk, designed to give a solid place to scribble poorly formed letters or procrastinate on essays. The sides of the leather instrument are raised to give my clumsy action the chance to avoid disaster and stop items from rolling off of the edge. These bumpers are lined with exposed stitching to give a break in the sea of brown like breaking waves on a windy day. The stitches hold nothing together but serve a very real purpose of than to spice up a rather boring surface. On the pad sits my scratch paper notebook, filled with algebra equations without context and items to complete for the day that rarely get checked off.

On the northern corners of my desk rests two plastic succulents in concrete planters to add a splash of nature to the monotonous yet complex colors of the deep maroon stained wood.  Despite them being clearly fake because of their chipped paint and their exposed plastic, they add vibrance and life to the dead pine, dried and hardened. The succulent on the western edge of my desk often gets shoved off of the edge by the compact battery-powered rock fountain or the glass mason jar of mechanical pencils, ballpoint pens, and lively colored markers. The jar is filled to the brim with writing utensils that I rarely use since most of my classes are online these days. 

On the opposite side rests my smart speaker, a white google home with a mesh top and a vibrant orange silicone bottom. This speaker is releasing laid back music all hours of the day, creating a relaxing vibe in my room and drowning out the ringing my ears seem to find in the silence. It also controls the RGB LEDs that I have outlining my room. The voice assistant can change the color of the lights to any conceivable hue with just a simple verbal command. However, the lamp residing next to the speakers is unable to provide a plethora of colors and only emits a warm yellow glow that coats the desk. The color of the light is welcoming to me and reminds me of the nights when I stay up late to work on a school project or to play games with friends.  

On my desk sits my laptop with all of the accompanying cords and mice to keep the computer alive and functioning. The mouse’s embedded lights breathe vibrant colors into the surrounding walls, the chair, and reflects off of the mirror, causing the room to dance at night. The movement of the mouse scrapes off the finish of the desk’s surface with every shift of the wrist leaving pale squiggles of raw pine. The more the mouse is used for its intended purpose the larger the pale oval gets. The imperfections of the desk are what makes it unique, without the scrapes and scratches the desk would just be a piece of scented pine without meaning.