When I Grow Up

I lie on my bed reading books borrowed from Megan � books from her bookshelf that she recommended, but has never read. Outside my room, my housemates presumably discuss their daily affairs in a language alien to me among the rattle of dishes.

My door is closed. There is a six peg wooden hanger nailed to the back of it, from which I hang my handbags and my magic bells, so that the door tinkles when I open and close it. It is hard to believe that a week has past from the day when I first opened the door to the bare room. I had bought no linen at the time, nor any decorations for the room, and I lay on the unmade bed trying to absorb my surroundings, and my situation. A wave of sadness engulfed me then, and I tried to sleep it away, but sleeping is hard on a creaky bed with a thin mattress and no sheets.

My room is looking a lot nicer now. The bed is made with purple sheets, and a purple quilt cover with abstract shapes. A poster of a white and Siberian tiger sitting beside each other is blue tacked on the wall beside my bed. A plush seahorse hangs on the red cupboards at the end of the room, which are housed in what used to be a fireplace. On the mantelpiece above sits my small crystal collection, a photo frame and various stuffed toys, including a large stuffed dog on loan from Megan. I have requested to paint the cracked wall around face of this ex-fireplace blue, but have been told by the landlord that he will have to get back to me on that request after asking the other owner (there are two, or three � nobody really knows because nobody has met them all). Not that they would notice if I had done it without asking them.

�They don�t care.� Abu tells me. He is one of the housemates, and has lived in the house for almost a year and a half. It is not hard to believe that what he says is true. The knee-length grass on the lawn outside remains uncut, despite Christine�s claims that the gardeners will be around to cut them soon. They came twice, in fact, she tells me. But it was raining on both occasions. I don�t remember them coming at all. The television is broken. The cleaners who are supposed to come once a week have apparently only been seen once a year.

Overall, the house is a disappointment. But it�s a disappointment that you can get used to, and then tell yourself that it�s not really that bad after all. The misleading double-sided A4 brochure still lies at the bottom of a pile of papers on my desk because sometimes I like to look over it and marvel. No, it really doesn�t sound like this house at all. But then again, it is a student house � what did I expect.

There are times when I think I should have taken the smaller room in the first house I saw where Athena, the dark haired girl who looked like a beautiful Greek goddess, offered me a fruit flavoured lifesaver. So I would have had to climb over my bed to get to my clothes (which probably wouldn�t have fit in the amount of storage space provided anyway) � at least I would have been in a house with people my own age � girls my own age - who might speak to me in a language I understood. Matt, the landlord, had introduced me to them all, and they had sat nervously in the living room while I had surveyed the house. In retrospect, that house had looked like one which would have had a tidy lawn with short grass, and a working television. But I could be wrong � it was just another student house after all.

I told Matt that I would come and see him in his office about that room the next day. Instead, I had come to see this room after Christine had arranged a viewing. I had taken it without hesitation, because it had been so much bigger with ample storage space, and because I did not feel comfortable staying at Megan�s house for much longer. I appreciated the fact that her family had agreed to put me up until I got myself sorted out, but there were moments where I felt like I didn�t fit in, and didn�t know how to act or what the appropriate response was.

�It has potential.� Megan says as she sits on my desk chair and surveys the new additions to my room. I have to agree � there definitely is potential. I have made a mental map of the wall for various posters. Some funky new curtains would probably do wonders for the room, and there is the pending request to paint a small part of it blue. But I wonder if I will go through with it all � I am after all only planning on staying here for four months at the most.

These thoughts pop in and out of my head as I lie on my bed at night. I wonder if I will ever get used to it, to all of this. Sometimes, I miss my room, my bed, but not enough to cry. Sometimes, I will even miss my mother. She will call me everyday on my cell phone, and ask me what I have eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Have I done my shopping, am I doing any exercise, have I washed my clothes. I don�t tell her, but I appreciate these calls. These same concerns would drive me crazy if I was still at home. Most of the time, she calls me as she is cooking dinner. I think of you when I am cooking, she tells me. Everyone would come down to eat when dinner was ready. Nobody comes down anymore.

I know she cries. She will laugh when I say this, but I know she does. During the day when my dad is at work. Maybe even when she is cooking dinner. She probably feels deserted, and I feel bad for her. Sometimes I wish that I could be there for her forever, or for as long as she needed me, but I know that she would drive me insane in that time. Yet here, I can�t remember what it was like to be mad at my mother. I can�t remember what it felt like to be annoyed with her � or how I could even be annoyed with her. I feel a fondness for her that I have not felt for a long time.

My mother would probably cry if she saw the conditions I was living in now. The cracks in my room (although they are not quite so bad, but it is not as immaculate as my room at home), the knee length grass outside.

�Your dad has built such a big and amazing house for you girls,� she would tell me before my leaving, �and you are all abandoning it.� Those times, I would feel guilty. My mother has always been good at making me feel guilty. I would wonder what would happen to the house after we all left forever � I certainly did not intend on living there for the rest of my life. I wanted to build my own house. Why had my dad built it, anyway? Had he really done it for us? Did he not think that we might want to make our own houses one day? I certainly wanted to � by no means would mine be as big or as amazing as my dad�s, but it would be mine, something I had helped create.

I design my house in my head all the time. Sometimes, I try to draw it but it never looks like I want it to, like it looks in my head. I try to make a virtual version of it in The Sims, but it never looks right on that either. The doors aren�t the kind that appeal to me and the stairs are too long. I wonder if I will ever be able to turn my vision into reality, maybe when I have finally managed to get my house built, I will be bitterly disappointed.

I wanted to be an architect at one stage in my life. Like most kids, I wanted to be many different things. The first answer I remember giving someone when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up was a parrot. I wanted to be a parrot for the longest time. I found them beautiful and intriguing. A rarity. As I got older I realized that you could not grow up and simply change your physical form � that the answer to the question �what do you want to be when you grow up� was bound by logical restrictions. Then came the ever-changing dreams. One year I had my mind set on being an astronaut, the next year an architect, the following a pilot, an author � there were many. People would laugh them off as far fetched and imaginative, and I would fume with bitter anger in my room, thinking I�ll show them, they won�t be laughing when I�m an astronaut.

My favourite dream was that of being the hermit writer in Mexico. I would have an estate in front of the beach, where I would sit on the verandah wearing a sombrero and writing books under the pen name Sir Rupert Smolf (now that I think about it, I probably wouldn�t be rich enough to own an estate, because nobody would buy a book that was written by someone called that). I would ride to the markets on my bicycle to buy fruits and vegetables, and listen to the sound of the sea at night. I have never been to Mexico. I don�t know why I envisaged it this way, but I didn�t want to find out what Mexico was really like because I found this dream comforting.

I grew older still and realized that even dreams had limitations � bound by �sensibility�. That�s when you start thinking about being things like bankers, and accountants, and computer programmers. Things that probably won�t make you happy, but will at least give you the chance to build your own house so at least one of your dreams can be fulfilled.

So there I am. Lying in between purple sheets, dreaming the sensible and achievable dream of becoming a multimedia designer. Is it really what I want to do? I find myself wondering. Most of the time I don�t know what I want to do, or where I am going. I think I see the deeper meaning behind the phrase �taking the plunge�. I have thrown myself into the sea that is life and am waiting to see where it will take me.

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