If I were to pick two objects that most clearly reflect the events of Year One, they would be my bedroom wall and my space heater. Odd, I know. Let me explain.
First of all, the space heater and the wall are two of the three things I remember about my room that year. When I came to live with my aunt and uncle, they didn't really have space for me, so my uncle cleaned all his weights out of his weight alcove and they put a spare bed in there. The basement itself was unfinished, so the room was un-insulated, which is where the space heater came into play. The "wall" itself had several incarnations: first, a white sheet held to the ceiling with tacks, then a wooden frame, and finally an actual wall.
The space heater is what made me first understand that my aunt and I occupied entirely different orbits. It was an enormous steel affair that stood just under three feet tall, and there were strict rules concerning its use. Absolute rules. Rules as unyielding as the Law of Gravity. And, in my mind, rules that were completely arbitrary.
1) Under no circumstances was the heater to be on when no one was present. This meant that my room was never a constant temperature.
2) Under no circumstances was the heater to be anywhere within five feet of a wall. This defaulted the heater to an awkward place in the middle of my room.
3) Under no circumstances was the heater to be within eight feet of the temporary cloth blanket wall. Heater is now in basement hallway. Room is left to its own devices.
4) Under no circumstances was the heater to be set on max. Max is the Devil's heat.
I once tried having a reasonable conversation with my aunt concerning the uselessness of this heater. It was then that I learned rules are absolute if an adult makes them for no reason other than the adult has breathed longer. I wrapped my brain around that one for a few years and practiced sulking in the interim.
The wall of my room was a meter, of sorts, that showed just how important I was currently in the minds of my aunt and uncle. When I first got here, they called all the skilled people in the family together and made a plan of how they were going to turn the weight alcove into a proper room. I was allowed to pick out the color of the walls. Everyone was very gung-ho about it all until they realised how fucking cold the basement was.
A slight loss of motivation occurred. All the necessary items for my wall accrue in the garage and begin to gather dust. I spent two weeks changing within three feet of the back door before I decided to take matters into my own hands. I scrounged in the linens for a suitably opaque but lightweight blanket and attached it to the ceiling with tacks. I now had a semblance of privacy, but was still freezing. Also, tacks refused to stay where they belonged, and aunt refused to buy me a staple gun for reasons I still do not comprehend. Really. She also complained almost incessantly about the tack marks accumulating in the ceiling, but stopped when I finally pointed out that there would, in theory, be a wall covering them up quite soon.
The makeshift wall and I never really got along, as this excerpt from a short story I wrote in eighth grade clearly expresses:
My “wall” and I have come to terms with each other. In other words, it is gone. Completely. I threw it out this morning in a fit of rage and am now in the process of finding a replacement. But all the blankets seem to have gone into hiding for some strange reason. Hmmmm... Are they afraid they will suffer the same fate?
Let me explain what the blanket did to send me over the edge. I had woken up at about 1 AM with an extreme case of the Midnight Munchies. I was laying there beneath my down comforter watching by breath go crystalline in the air. I was wanting pimiento cheese spread and milk. Of all things. But I was weighing the pros and cons of the whole excursion. Did I really want the cheesy goo badly enough to brave cold, sub-zero air and a long flight of treacherous steps?
By 1:15 I could stand it no longer. Bracing myself, I practically flew out of bed and took leaping bound over to the steps. There was just one obstacle: The curtain. In my sleepy haze I neither remembered its existence nor could I see it in the gloom of my bedroom. I met it head on and went careening headlong into the vacuum of space, wrapped in a flapping white sheet. A few stray tacks jabbed at me as I went.
Science states that an object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by another force. In this case, the other force was a large, metal space heater about half my height. Amber had placed it right in the middle of the hall because she swore that it would set the house on fire if it was within twenty feet of a wall. The sheet and I fell smack into it and became folded at a near ninety-degree angle over its hulking mass. Oh well, at least it was warm.
I lay there for a few moments, calmly contemplating my pain, thanking the cosmos that I was not being watched, as this probably would have counted among the top ten most humiliating things I have ever done in my life. Doing a somersault out the back door and into the garbage is still number one on the list, but I was sure the actions of the last few moments would come in close second to it.
My eyesight adjusted to the dimness and my mind hazed over. I wanted to go back to bed. Screw the pimiento. And I didn’t even really like milk that much, anyway. I try to get up, but the sheet has wrapped itself around me so tightly that I cannot move. In dazed anger I begin to thrash around, trying to free myself from the cotton and steely bits that had insisted upon mummifying me. Finally, I made it out and crawled back into bed. Woke up four hours later, heavily bruised, very grumpy, and lacking a wall.
A few months later they got the wooden framework for the wall up, so I was able to TIE the blanket to that and forego the tacks. After what had transpired between the heater, the tacks+blanket, and myself a few weeks prior, I was quite happy to see them go. The actual wall was never finished until my aunt decided to remodel the house and moved me into the dining room for several fateful months.
But that, I believe, is the beginning of year two.
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