I hate my room.

Let me revise that statement; it may be too general.

I hate the colour of the walls, the windows, and the floor of my room. I also hate everything in my room.
The walls are a shade between peach and coral. It is a colour that reminds me of puke; especially puke that contains partially digested strawberries. Every time I look at the walls, the acrid, pungent scent of vomit fills my nostrils. Sometimes, I even gag.  I often imagine that a giant toddler has been spreading their own regurgitated food over the plaster with their pudgy, oversized fingers. Every summer, my mother asks if I would like to repaint my room, and every summer, I decline.

The windows in my room are long and skinny. There are two of them, one on each outward facing wall. In the evening, the sunlight blinds me as I do my homework. I usually get a headache as I sit at my desk, squinting at my paper filled with mind-boggling equations and formulas. The sun sets bright orange, tinting the walls, which begin to look as if the toddler had been eating tangerines instead of strawberries. Every night, I consider closing the blinds, but then I decide against it.

The floor is an unnaturally bright hardwood; the warm, golden brown sometimes glows in certain lighting. Of course, it can be hard to tell because of the dust. Thick blankets of dust and grime coat every less trodden patch of floor: the space under the unapproachable tangle of wires in front of my outlet, the spot beside my desk where my clarinet has rested ever since I stopped taking lessons four years ago, and underneath my bed and bookshelves. When the heating first turns on in the early winter months, the dust is disturbed by the new airflow and takes several days to settle once again. During those days, I cough and choke in my sleep. Everyday, I walk past the closet where my family keeps the vacuum.

I keep very few articles of clothing in drawers. On my dresser, a couple piles of clean clothes have taken up permanent residence. If I wear something from the pile, it will soon be replaced when the next load of laundry is washed, dried and folded. The rest of the piles are only on my desk half time. During the day, I keep the piles on my bed, but at night, I move them to the desk. I move all five piles twice a day. I never miss a day. After all, if I didn’t move the piles at night, then I couldn’t sleep in my bed, and if I didn’t move them in the morning, then I couldn’t work at my desk. The laundry room is in my basement down just two flights of stairs.

There is more on my dresser than those couple piles of clothing. My makeup, which I don’t usually wear, is strewn across the surface, hidden among scraps of paper and granola bar wrappers. I think it’s actually in hiding from my face. The only thing on my dresser that I use regularly is a stick of deodorant that has been giving me a rash for a week. The rash is itchy and a red ring has formed in my underarm. This morning, I imagined to myself that there was actually a parasitic worm under the flesh, slowly eating away at me. There’s a garbage can in the bathroom and a fresh stick of deodorant in the cupboard under the sink.

I could change my room and make it much more bearable, even pleasant, but I think that changing it means that I care about it. I don’t care about it, not even in the slightest.

Besides, if I changed it, it might not suit me.