Rooms

How many rooms have you stood in? What rooms have you passed through today? The modern human in the Western world mostly lives out their life in rooms. The memory of rooms, echoes embedded in the walls. All the rooms and all the conversations and all the lives. Living rooms, bedrooms, offices, hotels, schools, hospitals - rectangular traps where memories are made and emotions laid bare.

Some of those rooms will now be gone, alive in memory only. The rooms of childhood. Some will be crystal clear and have a clarity in your mind, others will have blurred long ago. Your parents, siblings, birthdays and all of that happened somewhere. Some of those rooms are gone, demolished into dust, but the memory lives on frozen in time and space, but that space has gone. Everything happens somewhere, and in our lives at this point in history, a significant amount of it is framed by four walls.

Other rooms are still there, the building lives on but the personnel change. Does your childhood home still exist, someone is sitting in it right now. Think of all the people who have ever passed through a room. It could be modern, maybe only a few, or it could be old, hundreds of lives or it could be a hospital or hotel, thousands of lives. The room remains passive, a stage where dramas are played out. The room you are in now (are you in one now?), how many conversations has it heard? Your school, the classrooms, you can see yourself there, but its not you, its a passed (past) you in past life. My school is gone, knocked down and replaced with houses, still more rooms. But the classrooms live on in the collective memories of thousands of people, who are now adults. And everyones point of view is different. Shared experience, but memory will always differ, what I saw and my class mates saw filtered by our position in time and space. We can never observe the same experience from the same co-ordinates as others, the angles are always different, the point of view skewed.

Frozen still shots framed by buildings. Nearly always rectangular or square, a circular room so unusual that you will always remember it, even if the events that occurred in it are forgotten. Then really try to remember, and its hard, there are parties and conversations and families but there is also television and boredom and long stretched long forgotten. There are times alone, the dark corners of rooms, only you and the walls know about that, no one else to record the moment. Try to visualize the exact layout of all those spaces, the clarity has become dusty with time.

Corners

And then there the intimate moments. No collective memory here. Just you and one other, the lost lover. The first time you said the words, and only two people in the whole world were in that room at that moment. It could have been years ago, do they remember it the same as you? And the conversations that only two people have, the emotions, and the tears and the break. The memory is subjective, the lighting, the placement, and the exact words are lost, all that is left is the tone and the emotion. Think of the rooms you live in, do they hold someone elses secret conversations, do they hold yours? You inhabit the space, do you inhabit the memory?

The surreal rooms of childhood, when everything is new but also everything is familiar, there is no other reference point. There is a room from my childhood and its dark, the curtains are drawn, there is an old woman in a dressing gown. She never leaves, agoraphobia and hypochondria mixed with abandoned youth. A modern day Miss Havisham in a council flat. And she seems so old because I was so young; but now I am older I'm not so sure.

The pivotal room, there is one. There are strange shaped milk bottles, the wallpaper has gone yellow and the ceiling is sepia from year of smoke, and there is always tea and biscuits and there are always people. There are newspapers on the table, there are crosswords, there is breakfast cooking, there is butter and fresh bread. There is dinner cooking, and it is always warm, and the world is outside, and there are Christmas's and winter and then there are summers and birthdays. And the building is old, these are not the first lives to be lived out in these rooms, someone called this home long before. It was a house with basement and four floors above and now its been converted into flats. And whoever lives there has no idea that any of this happened. They carry on. Half the people in the memory are gone, they fade but stay captured in the memory camera, again there are no words, just image and tone. We carry on.

Hospital rooms are the ones we don't like to think of. Because we know. We know what the room represents, and for all its saviours and resuscitations we all ultimately know how the story of these rooms end. The constant cleaning and hygiene can't wash away what the walls and the floor and the ceiling know, silent observers to it all.

Hotel rooms, the most transient of rooms. Thousands upon thousands of lives crossing through the same small space. Everyday it starts afresh, memory blanked.

There are places you will never go again, houses, hospitals, colleges, friends flats, back rooms in shops and hotels and waiting rooms - where life is on hold. Some you were in for seconds, literally passing through, others you were in for years, every grain in the floor and flaw in the wallpaper studied. And in those rooms are people you will never see again, and conversations you will never repeat, and right now in those rooms are people you will never meet. Some are clear, some are forgotten.

How many rooms have you been in? How many do you remember? Sometimes I think about rooms.