300 Words -- My Dorm

The serpentine of Christmas lights slide along the far wall of my pressed dorm room, through a pinned collage of old friends, past memories and scattered inspirational quotes jotted down on scrunched yellow memo pad paper from Barack Obama to William Faulkner, each item with it’s own distinct level of importance. The blinds are shut, but do a half-assed job at its objective, especially after 6:00 p.m., when sheets of mischievous fluorescence from across the street invariably sneak somehow onto my eyelids, no matter how many times I attempt to block them. Clothes are strewn into four piles: dirty, not dirty enough that I can’t wear them again without a trip to the washer, clean and clean but yet to be folded. Jeans almost never make it to the dirty gathering; any guy knows that jeans don’t get dirty, and a wash is detrimental if you want them to keep that ever-so-valuable personalized hug to your hips. The desk hides under an intense amount of clutter with no intention of being found. Notebooks from classes, past and present, filled with hundreds of lectures, presentations and slideshows take advice from the clothing and fall into separate piles that only I know the difference to. “Is it the black or blue spiral I need for tomorrow’s class?” I ask myself. I refuse to answer and put both in my backpack, mainly because I don’t want to run back to my room later the next day rather than making sure I have the correct supplies for class. To an outsider, my room poses as a problem. It’s not Hoarders-worthy, but I’m about a dozen cats away. It may look disastrous to some, but it makes sense to me. Among the chaos that inhibits my personal sanctuary from it being the relaxing paradise it should be, the outside world offers me another chance to make that a possibility. I just haven’t had enough time to screw it up yet.