3. June #3
I like to call my bedroom “carefully curated chaos.” My desk is buried under art history textbooks and scattered supplies with string lights I hung ironically—and now actually love—draped above.
The bedspread is dusky rose, almost mauve, and there’s a print of a Klimt painting above my headboard I bought at a museum gift shop.
A few canvases lean against the wall, pieces I’m still deciding whether to keep or paint over.
The real work happens upstairs in the converted attic, my actual studio, where the light pours in from skylights and I can spread out without worrying about dripping paint on my bedspread.
But my room is where I sleep, where I think, where I keep the work that’s too personal to leave in a space anyone might wander into.
I sit on the edge of my bed and pull my diary from between the mattress and the headboard.
The leather cover is soft from repeated use.
I have other diaries stored in the closet, and I used to write pages and pages about my day.
Now I prefer little glimpses into my world, little memories I can look back on when I’m older.
I flip to the next blank page and write fast, barely legible: This morning, Mom said I make something beautiful out of what I feel. Carter almost fell off his stool. The kitchen was gold. I want to remember the golden color.
I close it and shove it back into its hiding spot.
I grab my messenger bag from where I dropped it last night, check that my sketchbook and laptop are inside, and shove in a granola bar for later. My phone has a text from Cinna asking if I want to get coffee before class, and I type back a quick, Yes meet you at Bean There before pocketing it.
On my way back down the hall, I pass by Aeron’s room. His door is open. I pause in the doorway.
His room is the opposite of mine, neat in a way that feels defensive.
His bed is made with purpose, the sheets pulled tight, and the single pillow centered exactly.
There’s nothing on the walls except a corkboard covered in sketches, most of them half-finished faces with haunting eyes.
His desk is organized into careful quadrants: pencils here, erasers there, reference books stacked by size.
It’s the room of someone who has decided that if he can control the space around him, maybe the space inside him will follow.
I’ve found it… unnerving. He can be complete chaos in other ways, especially with how eclectic he is about art, dabbling in anything and everything. And yet, his room is so… military, I guess? It doesn’t feel like the room of an artist.
But every artist is different. I think my brother has such a rich, vibrant inner world that he doesn’t care much about the external one.
Maybe that’s a better way to live; he doesn’t care about what others think. I need more of that attitude.
He’s sitting at his desk with his back to me, hunched over something small.
He’s so focused he doesn’t even notice when I inch into the room to see what he’s doing.
There’s a tiny sculpture, no bigger than his palm, made entirely of paperclips.
He’s bent them into something organic, almost skeletal, and he’s using a dab of superglue to attach another clip to the structure.
The piece looks like a ribcage spreading itself open.
It’s beautiful. And so quintessentially Aeron that my chest aches.
I open my mouth because I want to ask him if he’d like to walk to class with me.
We’re in the same Visual Studies class at ten, so it only makes sense.
But he’s so focused, so lost in his work, that I don’t want to risk breaking his flow.
I know I get irritated when someone interrupts when I’m vibing with a piece.
I tiptoe away quietly and then head down the stairs. By the time I reach the first floor, I can hear Mom’s hairdryer humming behind her closed bedroom door. Through the front window, past the wraparound porch with its old swing, I can see that Carter’s car is already gone from the driveway.
“Mom!” I call up the stairs. “I’m heading out!”
The hairdryer shuts off. Footsteps sound on the creaking floorboards, and then she appears at the top of the stairs, half her hair still damp and hanging loose. “Wait, wait, wait. Get back here.”
I grin and jog up a few steps to meet her.
This is our thing, the thing we’ve done since I was little, since I was too small to reach her without her bending down.
She opens her arms and I step into the hug, breathing in the familiar scent of her lavender face cream and the coffee still lingering on her breath.
Her next words are scripted, in a way, because we’ve had this back and forth a hundred times.
“You got this,” she says into my hair. “Whatever today throws at you.”
“What if today throws a piano?”
“Then you catch it and play a song.” She pulls back, holding me at arm’s length, and gives me the look. The Mom look, the one that sees everything. “Love you more than all the colors in the world.”
“That’s a lot of colors.”
“I know.” She boops my nose with her finger, which would be embarrassing if anyone saw it but is actually the best part of my morning. “Now go. Change the world.”
“I will.”
“That’s my girl.”
A few moments later, I’m stepping off the porch and onto the path, letting the screen door close softly behind me. The sun is fully up now, painting the neighborhood in shades of amber. The air has that crisp edge that means the summer will be fading soon.
I’m grinning. My little family. Chaotic, loud. Absolutely, unequivocally mine.