Episode 9: Rooms
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be. This week we’re looking at both a childhood and adult memory, between which is a comparison trap and the growing awareness of it. Both moments are set in the same place—among the display rooms of Ikea. This episode and poem explore how easy it is to construct caricatures or imaginary people from our surroundings who are either better or less than ourselves (particularly the former). There is a delicate balance here between imagining (and moving toward) the life you want to live and romanticizing a perfect version that may never exist. This dynamic can further trap us into a pit of forgetting to be grateful for what’s in front of us, alongside recognizing those things we and others truly don’t have access to, due to financial reasons, discrimination, or other. This is a rich, deep topic and I hope you enjoy it.
I’ll share it with you now:
Hopscotching royal blue taped arrows
that mark slate grey footpaths between rooms,
I try on quintessential
kitchens, bedrooms,
living rooms, and bathrooms.
Goose-neck sinks, burnished bunk beds,
leather couches, and crisp
plastic shower curtains.
Birch tables, polished dressers,
blinking game consoles, and milky tubs.
Above some, beneath others, I
drift through a breathing,
visceral receipt: of types of people,
costs to wear them and
prices to become them.
Luscious turtlenecks and thick-rimmed glasses
frame a fresh-faced, uncreased flesh mother who slips
her chair across gleaming hardwood floors,
clicking forget-me-not pumps betwixt wood and tile,
and sliding a creamy ceramic cup across the counter.
Sapphire satin pyjamas and a pot of gold—
collared, ironed, steamed, and curled—
sleep soundly, softly shifting whispering sheets
while sun spills, flawlessly, through
sheer strips of unfaded linen.
Soft-soled, fit-fingered children (with pimple-free skin) scroll,
swiping away games and flicking between gaming systems,
harmoniously code-switching language with parents.
Not a drip of argument, eye-rolling, or arched neck.
Eyes glitter with pixie dust light: ethereal space linking face and screen.
Crack open your eyes now. Taste
lingonberry-soaked soft serve cupped by cold fingers.
Argumentative. Drowsy eyes. Stooped, sore neck.
Gaze down. Notice the arrows shiver.
Blink. You’ve been asleep for a long time.
They’re not real. They’re cast from a projector concealed
in the ceiling. Wander to display windows. They’re balconies of
pale brick walls closer than any house is allowed to be built.
Silly. The pre-constructed persona people
with matching puppies from 101 Dalmatians live here, in Ikea.
Not you. Not us. Not anyone.
Don’t forget your own stanza.
Frizzy-curled, freckled kids—
always kids, because even as adults
we spend more time in Neverland
than we care to admit—
are a bit of each room we’ve lived in
because we’re a bit of each room we’ve walked through,
carefully constructed. Descriptive not prescriptive,
worth much more than any printed price, and
alive.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
