Room for me

Maybe the most cradled security or identity feeling I have ever known, my whole life long, centers on my own personal space.  It is one the earliest senses of self I have and begins in my bedroom when I lived outside Annapolis.  We moved there in 1989, the summer I began middle school.  You know what I mean by sense of self right?  A first real foothold on the inside terrain called Kelly that's been with me all these years.

What stands out is me making my room my own.  Right down to a sign on the door called Kelly's Place.

Writing about it now brings back a lineage of memories that predate middle school.  The back cubby of our garage in Severn, concrete that extended on the left beyond the space for cars.  I used cardboard boxes to establish my own little nooks and special places back there.  My wonderland, amid the spider webs and dust and athletic gear of Sean and dad's, that's what it felt like.  Magic.  This was the space I relied on to create Murder Mysteries and Haunted Train Rides for the other kids in the neighborhood.  Or Grammy's attic in Brooklyn, the corner where the slant of eaves triangled off a spot between the dresser with the vanity mirror and the bookshelf to the right.  This was my spot, where I arranged stuffed animals and a typewriter that belonged to either Sharon or Sue.  Or actually, probably Paul.

At 21 I dropped out of college for the second time.  That's when, on suggestion from a book called Simple Abundance, I purposefully created a corner in mom's basement for me.  To "find" myself.  This was the first time I consciously used the tool of a sacred space, though back then, in early 99, I don't think I used it more than three or four times.  But to be sure, every single home I have lived in since that winter at mom's I have made my space.  In Chestertown on Mt. Vernon and at Truslow Road and Anngar Farm I actually had my own little room for me.  In Easton, too.  Every other place, including Ocean Pines where it currently is, I took with me that first chair, from back in mom's basement in 1999.

It's where and how I charge my battery.  When I went on the road I made a travelling alter and so long as it and its contents were next to me I knew peace.  In Huntington the alter went next to my bed so my bed became my space, my little nest.  This morning, at about 9am, Nici off surfing alone because this was even more important than that, I finished my room.

I didn't even know this room existed until I moved in, it's a little extension off the closet and the door was closed when I looked at the place.  Now it's my office.  Where the magic to write and grow and learn and evolve through grad school will begin.  My little room for me is the most quiet place in the world, and still, too, like I am tucked in the belly of the earth.  Even dark as it is back there, I swear it glistens.

So that's that.  Erika, who arrived last night, who launched her book from Barnes and Noble in Annapolis where we're from.   And me in my magic room finally, also arrived, back to self.  Home.