The room started out clean, unblemished. There was one coat of paint on the walls, white, with a strip of sesame street characters along the edge of the ceiling. There was a crib in the center of the room next to the lamp, with a baby who knew nothing but bliss. Soon she started to grow, outgrowing the crib and the ring of friendly drawn creatures along the walls. Soon she started to think. A new coat of paint was put onto the walls. But with unsteady hands comes imperfections. When she started to see, to really see, she saw that life was beginning to have deformities, like that room she found herself in. Stages, she found herself in, with oddly bright colors making their way up the walls and messes beginning to form in the closet. She changed along side her room and her house. Teas stains marked the pillows in the living room and unswept shattered glass bits still idled in the corners of the kitchen. Good grades hung on the cabinet and plants blossomed by the window pane. She found herself in these walls, sheltered in these walls. There was something missing, though. Something that she could feel and she could see and even touch, but nobody said anything about it. Her house was falling apart. More coats of paint covered the walls of her room, creating bumps over the places that untouched paint had run and then dried. She thought that these coats would keep the house together, attach herself to the warmth that had once emanated from those walls. But the water dripping through the cracks in the ceiling could not be fixed, and shelter started to cave in. When she stood outside, she looked through the big window at the kitchen table one last time. She could still see them, sitting there, laughing, even though they stood sullenly by the taxi next to her. But she couldn’t take her eyes off that little girl, at the kitchen table. The one with that seemingly eternal smile. But the mirror of time can only last for so long before it begins to fade. And so it did. The image went back to the empty space in the kitchen, and empty space was all she could feel where once there was such great passion for life. She had to let go. She stepped away from what for so long seemed like the shelter, yet was only a facade sheltering her from what she already knew.