Rooms

Imagine your life as a building. A building with lots of different rooms. Rooms of work. Rooms of people. The rooms of your life. Rooms of the tranquil and the calm. Rooms of screams and laughter.

Some rooms you hardly walk in, where everything is clean and tidy, as if nobody ever entered. Quiet and untouched. But still, it is there and you know, you could enter whenever you like. And maybe you have never entered. Yet. Maybe you never entered, because you never needed to, or you simply didn’t want to. Some rooms in our lifetime can be scary or a long time ahead in the future. Alluringly testing whether you can resist the shiny temptations. The doors keep closed safely until the moment, we believe we are ready to open one of them, to explore what is behind. Which story will be our next? Ready to be loved and equally ready to be hated. And one day, maybe we will begin to change things in the room, for the better, for worse, and in the end, it might develop into another room. Sometimes you find that you opened the door too early or too late, that you missed the point, the right, life-changing moment.

In some rooms there might be a lot of dust, shimmering in the thin glimpses of sunlight that have made it past the heavy curtains. For a stranger, they might appear as if you have stopped entering these rooms ages ago and no one can know whether it was too painful to come back from time to time, or whether the stories of these rooms are long forgotten secrets. Rooms you used to hide in. For days, for months or even for years. Rooms that become a mess of broken parts of your soul.

As time is passing by and time is running out, it makes you weaker and the room begins to shrink. It shrinks, ever moving on, until the moment that there is nothing left of you, or until the first step that you move. Out to anywhere. Some wise people might say now that it might be good to open the door of these rooms once in a while. Step in and remember that these rooms will always be a part of your life. But you know that it is a part of the past, not a part of the present, nor of the future.

So you close the door again. You wander through the hallways without the tiniest glimpse back, without a wonder what you could have changed in that room to make it beautiful and shiny again and no regret that you never seemed to have the time or the strength to lock it up forever.

And then there is this one room. It doesn’t matter what is inside the room. It can be anything, but it matters everything to you. When you open the door, you smile in sunny anticipation, in happy expectation of the welcoming knowledge that in this room everything is just fine. This room is a shelter. You feel safe and sound and so you are. You know that your life is a great building. A building that needs to be kept alive, until the day you must leave forever. You know, you cannot stay forever in this one room of perfect happily-ever-after. But live blissfully, dear reader. And know that this room can be behind any door you open. If it isn’t, then worry not, dear reader, it will be just next door.