Charlotte Bellows is the author of The Definition of Beautiful: A Memoir. She is a freshman at the University of Victoria.
I clearly remember my last night sleeping in my childhood bedroom.
The walls were naked, stripped of all the music and art posters that made my room mine.
My bookshelf, once overflowing, was empty; even the dust that had settled around my books, outlining their placement on the shelves, had been wiped clear.
The next day, I would be getting on a plane and leaving home to go away for university. It was well known in my family that my room was bigger than my brother’s, so he would be switching into my room after I left.
I was horrified at the thought of coming home from university to visit and seeing that things were different from when I had left. A subtle but persistent churning in my stomach grew stronger as my departure date approached. But I knew my dread was unfair, and change was inevitable. If I’m leaving home to grow, I can’t expect to return as a changed woman to find my childhood perfectly intact.
Ever since I’d started thinking about it, I was convinced that I wanted to leave Calgary for university. I was entranced by the idea of experiencing a new city, a new adventure, a fresh start. The closer I got to leaving, though, the less certain I felt. Maybe I was making a mistake. I loved Calgary. I loved how even on cold winter days, the glowing sun would make the snow sparkle; how I could drive 10 minutes and be reunited with the people I had grown up with; how I could relive a fragment of my childhood just by walking down a certain street. All this, and I was about to give it away – for what? To hope I could be as happy elsewhere? What could possibly be better than this?
I loved my room for the ways it had grown with me. The Winnie the Pooh stickers that had been plastered onto my bed frame, until I decided they weren’t cool and desperately scraped them off in Grade 4. The nook of my closet, where I would sit when I was six years old and upset, finding comfort in the walls wrapping around me like a hug. These days, the closet chokes me with claustrophobia, and the torn Winnie the Pooh stickers were probably last seen at a landfill a decade ago.
I left my room, left the house, walked to the playground near my house after dark – the one I always went to on warm summer afternoons when I was younger. Wandering through my empty neighbourhood streets had all the uncanniness of exploring an abandoned movie set after filming had ended.
At the playground, the equipment was reduced to shadowy outlines in the darkness. Everything was still; the sky above was an endless blot of black. Something felt off, unsettling. I wasn’t supposed to be here any more. But I sat on the same swing I would always excitedly sprint to, just to prove that there was something here once.
I didn’t want to forget the things that once made me happy.
Several weeks later, I was home for Thanksgiving. It felt odd to drop my bags in my brother’s old room instead of my own.
My first night back, my best friend spent the night at my house. After dark, we slipped out the front door.
It was a brisk autumn evening. The rust-orange leaves had accumulated on the ground, revealing crooked branches. The air was sweet and crisp with their decaying scent. Everything was still so lush and green where I went to university, still a hazy daydream of summer.
How strange that time seemed to move more quickly here. I blinked, and life seemed to move on without me.
We stood on the sidewalk in front of my house as my friend flicked at her faulty lighter, trying to light our shared joint held in her narrow fingers. I stared back at the façade of my home.
Childhood is like an old house you’ve moved out of. You can’t go back in – the locks have been changed.
But I remember every corner, the exact placement of the furniture, the way sunlight slanted through the half-closed blinds and fell on the scratched hardwood floor. The hooks at the back door we would hang our winter coats on, our noses red from the cold. The corner of the kitchen where a dinner plate slipped from my hands; I cried because it shattered in a way that I couldn’t even recognize how the pieces had fit together in the first place. My mom comforted me, assuring me that we would buy a replacement, but we were never able to track down the exact style.
The lighter finally managed to ignite, sending dancing flickers of warm light across my friend’s face as she held it to the end of the joint perched in her lips. She breathed in, and slid the lighter back into her pocket. Then she turned to me. “Ready to walk?”
“Just one more minute,” I said, still staring at the house. “I’m almost ready to go.”