As I sit to write, I often find myself in my room with a laptop in the foreground and occasionally paying attention to the background. When I look up from my laptop to the surrounding room I am greeted by all too familiar sights. Put yourself in a foreign bed, in a foreign room, in my domain. Imagine to your right there is a metallic light sprawling out from a wooden bed frame and not too far off in the distance, an almost identical light emerges from a desk pressed up against a wall under a window. The desk looks long and thin from this side view. Between the desk and yourself is a nightstand with an open drawer containing everything from sunglasses to an old stained brown golf ball.

Something in the blue room suddenly captures your attention. Your eyes travel up from the nightstand, past the desk to the far wall, where an old blue and pink Black Keys poster hangs. Not far from there, to the left, is a mirror gilded in old high school wrestling metals hanging over a bureau. A little farther in the same direction is the end of this wall and the beginning of a new one. Two doors exist on this wall, the first brings you to the hallway, the other brings you to a closet. Between them is a plethora of musical equipment and instruments. Next to the door on the left is a bookshelf, containing everything but books. The top shelf is filled with rows of plaques, reminiscent of a successful career in combat sports, one leaning up against another. The other two shelves are filled with old hats ranging from costume top hats to baseball caps, among them, the top of a broken ceramic jug collected from a shipwreck from the ocean floor, and an old rotary phone not plugged in, just sitting collecting dust like everything else. With the end of that bookshelf comes the end of that wall and your eyes find the final wall which the bed you lie on is pushed up against.

There is nothing exciting on this wall except for two windows dimmed by their drawn shades. Still, they let in just enough light to allow you to notice a general glaze of filth throughout the room. You shudder at the sight as you think to yourself, “Where is the door?” Whether it is the waterfall of clothes flowing from the open drawers of the bureau, or the fact that every flat surface is covered in junk, replicating the contents of the nightstand drawer. The fact remains that the owner could certainly do without half of it.