The Room

By: Flyby Stardancer

I stand here looking into a barely-used, icy, metal bedroom. It feels like a cage, with no windows to the outside world, save for the plain, ordinary door.

There is dust carpeting the floor, except for a single, straight trail leading from the barren metal floor outside the door to the plain metal bed.

Next to the bed, there is a nightstand. It, too, is made of metal. On the nightstand, there are two pictures. One is of the object of the owner’s affection and it appears to have been taken without the permission of the person in it. The other picture is smaller, and in the shadow of the first. It is of the owner of the room with his best friend. They are laughing carelessly, as if there were no problems in the world that they couldn’t handle.

Across the worse-for-wear room, there is a desk, covered with a heavy veil of dust. On the desk is a laptop, accompanied by a wide, tall tree of books, none of which have been used recently, all waiting the time when they’ll be touched, when they’ll be used by a friend.

The walls have been wallpapered with a wild assortment of posters, ranging from music bands such as BBMak and Britney Spears, to advertisements for amusement parks such as Great America and Six Flags. There are also some for movies, such as a set of four connecting posters from “Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace”. Many of the lower ones have three parallel scratches down them, as if a large cat had raked its claws on them instead of using a scratching post.

The only light in the room comes from an assortment of scattered lamps along the seam between the poster-covered walls and the plain, boring ceiling.

As a whole, the room has the feeling of tired energy, of faded hope. A war has gone on in this room. A war of emotions, good and bad, has left scars that are not seen, but merely felt.

Then, the owner walks in. He appears to be fairly young, about eighteen years. A sadness plays across his face as he walks over to the nightstand, picks up the picture of him and his friend that was in the shadows, and just stands there staring at it for several long minutes. Finally, the stillness is broken when a tear trails down his face. The tear dives off of him as it reaches the boy’s chin, causing ripples in the dust where it lands on the floor.

“My friend… What have I done?”

He sits down on his bed and holds the picture tightly to his chest, as if imagining he’s holding the girl in the picture. Tears flow more quickly, forming streams that flow down his face, and rage to the floor, where they congregate in miniature lakes surrounded by mountains formed by the particles they disturbed. Slowly, he begins to rock forward and back, whispering things he believes he should have done.