The Room

The world is a Room of contempt.  It is a Room we collectively share, yet each individual takes solitude in.  It is a product of us and it produces it: a womb of humanity and all that entails.  We live in it, yet each day our lives are less the living.

The grey, textured wallpaper is made of shame: of greed and violence and hatred infused to surround us, to remind us of our deeds and our doings.  It is a grey that is less colour and more void.  The vinyl floor on which we stand is smooth underfoot but our feet remain planted, stuck stubbornly as though adhered by fear, or dread, or apathy.  There is a hanging light that extends from the centre of the ceiling, intermittently flashing but never bringing true illumination.  In the corner stands a full-length mirror; a dreary, tear-stained sheet haphazardly thrown over covers it, creased and ragged and kind.  Nobody wants to see their reflection.

Melancholy drapes frame the windows that are glazed over, barring vision of another world: a world of promise because it is beyond, outside ourselves, untouched by our evil.  One wonders if it actually exists anywhere but in our hopes.  It is tantalizing – you stare at the glass waiting for a vision to appear, an answer that will seem obvious and yet entirely unthinkable.  A key to unlock this misery, this banality, this cycle of despair.

A key to what?  There is no door.  There is no escape.  There is history and logic to prove that.  It is a prison, confining us to our mistakes and reminding us of our flaws.  Good thing that mirror is covered.

Someone thought of painting the Room.  As though interior design could fix this.  Suffering does not disappear under an undercoat.  Pain cannot be glazed over with a change in décor.  It is in the walls themselves, a part of the very structure: ironically it traps and protects simultaneously.

And I guess that’s the real tragedy of the Room.  For all of the horror that we know exists, for all of the screams and the silence, the Room is not to blame.  If anything, the Room provides a chilling sort of comfort.  A sense of constancy, of consistency, of expectations being lived up to.  It is as reliable as it is abhorrent.

No, the fault lies not in the Room, but in those who built it.  The fault, dear world, lies in ourselves.