I remember when I was a kid we had a room that the first door up the stairs & was the only room that our parents told us we couldn’t go into it was always cluttered & dusty & scary for a little child like me to traverse over the numerous boxes & instruments sometimes if I was feeling powerful I would leep over some boxes and dig and find old Christmas presents my brother & I forgot about & didn’t want so our parent decided to hide them away so they didn’t have to admit they spent money on that & there was I time that I got this plastic sticker maker & because I didn’t read the directions I heated a plastic Patrick which forever burned him it it & another thing I broke were these old rolls of flim that I would lift to the window and see vague outlines of my parents or people in them I would step on them & crumble them & rip them in half for no other reason than it was fun to me & now I have some guilt over what sort of history I destroyed but it was okay because my dad decided to clean up the room & it took him weeks to do so then that room became my brother’s for quite some time which made it the best room in the house because of all the space and the fact the black mold in the basement wasn’t aired through the ventilation in that room but that didn’t matter because my brother & I would sit and wrap blankets on the vents for warmth during the winter so we already got our hearty dose of black mold & when we wanted to clean our blankets we would do downstairs past the rusted sink that continues to scare me even now & I don’t know why but the fact it was a massive basin that was completely covered in rust that was the only object that was ever highlighted because the other lights were broken meant that it would be the only thing I saw when I would go downstairs & now that image is burned into my mind as an adult & thankfully we didn’t wash our clothes in that but we went right next to it and would wash our clothes in a hand-me-downs’s hand-me-down of a washer & dryer & then go back to our rooms where there would always be a roach sitting outside the bathroom each night & sometimes see-through blue bugs would run through our room but it was okay because we moved out of that house.
Ethan Warble is a first-year English major. 3008457@wcupa.edu