Remembering rooms; both mine and others
My Bed by (1998) by Tracey Emin
Today, for some reason, I’m thinking about the various rooms I’ve inhabited through the three decades of my existence. Some strange Enneagram test, one of those emotional blueprints designed you to gain some sort of unidirectional insight into yourself, tells me that my personality type values security above all.
Bedrooms have also, meant to me, the ultimate safe haven, a refuge from the world at large, a space that can be whittled and chiseled according to my changing needs and desires, where I can be naked literally and figuratively and my shame can be nursed in private, where tears flow easy, and the need to be whole can be momentarily assuaged.
I don’t remember the exact contours of the past but certain rooms stick with me— like old scars that never fade, or core memories that remain in the recesses of the mind and collect dust, only to be taken out and admired breathlessly in private.
One such room in the bylanes of Lutyen’s— a friend’s bedroom-turned-painting studio. A sprawling desk in a corner, adorned with her MacAir, always playing a Spotify playlist (before Spotify was mainstream and we had to VPN it to access it), the sound of her puppies pattering on the wooden flooring, a stack of global art magazines alongside a single bed. A double window beams the winter sunlight right onto me as I lie down at the foot of her bed and chat about our dreams of being artists, our changing bodies, feeling immortal in our early 20s, our insecurities laid out before us to perform autopsies and commemorations for as we returned trashed from dubious south Delhi parties, reeking of cheap alcohol and stale pot, sometimes the kathi roll from the kebab stall at Khan Market. I remember the tofu bowls and stream of various kinds of tea— jasmine, chamomile, hibiscus— the warmth from the cup radiating into our bodies as with the very act of being snuggled in bed, with the door shut, safe from the world and its daily assault, we could finally open up.
There are some conversations you could only have in bedrooms, some friendships that exist due to a strange mix of luck and proximity, really coalesce and are more than just real life— they’re a necessary relief from it. We talked so much about everything with no plans to solve anything, making a Sunday into Sunday by wasting it, stretching out the hours, building a shelter, making an apartment count as a house.
How many small households construct themselves like this, invisible to one another, cocooned far within all the large nondescript buildings in this city, each Sunday, each weekend, on any day of the week? All these people randomly thrown together by chance, by the internet, the need for housing, by money and its lack, by proximity and logistics and the wide-armed iterative hope that rises up against logic again and again, further down the afternoons, further down our lives, in these rooms none of us own, in these homes we invent between one another, with so little proof to any of it, white-knuckling safety and family and the shape of a life out of pure irrational belief.
The various, rotating spaces in these rooms we occupied without hesitation, our limbs bending and moving in ways public spaces could never allow for. How talking shit ritualistically on these Sundays invented meaning out of nothing, drawing together, slowing down, offering rewards without needing to earn them.
My best friend’s bedroom on the first floor— with its balcony where we sit, drinking whiskey mostly, coffee sometimes. She braids my hair on some mornings, other mornings we scroll Snapchat and order in coffee and sandwiches. Sometimes, a boy I used to love visits and we pass glasses of whiskey between us, the Delhi cold settling in our limbs like molten lead, sleeping with our backs to one another but with the comfort of knowing that hers will be the first face I glimpse when I wake up. What is the definition of these romances that pale in comparison when compared to the resounding idea of love? The romance of friendships is often overstated in many, trite ways but the luxury and excitement of cohabiting with a friend, sprawled in the different corners of her room, her colour-coordinating her cupboard, me reading a book, forces all the itchy parts of the world into the shape of beauty.
All romance is inefficient, that’s the point of it, and that’s why we like it. In another bedroom in another part of the world, a friend fusses over good coffee. I watch her roast, grind, tamp the beans in her expensive coffee machine, while she talks to me about how she bought the imported French wine because I judged her for the Indian one the last time I was over.
I’m not sure how to tell her that I love bad coffee, that good coffee often makes me feel like I’ve taken myself too seriously, and taking yourself too seriously is the difference between silly and stupid. She tells me I should be able to taste hints of fruit in my coffee. I say I’d rather just eat fruits instead. She smiles. As long as I can have bad coffee with my friend, I can claim that I didn’t mean to be silly, that I’m only committing to the bit.
Another room on top of a hill, overlooking a valley marked with freshly painted homes with baroque stone archways and the sunlight filtering through, despite the cold. Here, my friend and I have endless cups of coffee while we discuss the news story she’s chasing in Cambodia, being in our 20s and hurtling through life in Delhi without brakes, why bad ideas feel so good. We have yet another cup, sequestered on her pink, flowery sofa knowing that it’s a bad idea. That the another cup of coffee achieves nothing except digestive stress. Haven’t you ever believed in something despite knowing it made no sense, despite knowing any declaration of your belief was indefensible? Haven’t you ever wanted nothing to count and your body never to decay, surviving through pure spite and will, as though nothing would ever come due, as though logic and reason and fact were just a cluster of petty little powerless accountants, and the world offered something better than their warnings?
There are some conversations you can only have in a bedroom. At the onset of a panic attack or in the middle of an argument that only moves in circles, circumventing defenses and apologies and attacks with a strange ant-like dexterity. Something about lying down next to the warm body of the person you can’t remember you love floods your muscles with the reach of memories; you’ve laid in the same position with lovers and friends and you think of the strangeness of all the Sundays past and how their bedrooms form a part of your life that’s forever changing; being young, and temporary, and knowing that these shapes, these groupings, this room that wasn’t a room, isn’t supposed to last. This was the layover, the station on the way to the next station on the way to wherever we were going. Maybe that’s why it mattered so much, why it felt so safe, so comprehensively tender.
Having a chat in your friend’s room is a finite action, even when drawn out across a whole Sunday; eventually it runs out, eventually the coffee mug is empty, eventually there’s something else to do. Eventually it’s Monday morning. Your life catches up to you; the next thing happens.
We made a home in the breaks between one thing and the next, between action and consequence, between thought and decision, living with one another for these small moments in the grace of delay. I would have stayed there forever if I could, trapped in that bedroom on a Sunday like a bug in amber. I’ve had all the good coffee that people who talk about coffee the way wine people talk about wine rhapsodize over, and I’d trade all of it for one mug from that drip machine on a Sunday in that kitchen, in a home made possible because it couldn’t last.
Lying in bed aimlessly with a friend or a lover makes everything from your own bed in your own home to the strange IKEA bed in an Airbnb into one and the same bed. It’s the same way an apartment becomes a house, the way a stranger becomes a friend and a friend becomes family, the alchemy that renders small and meaningless objects anxious and magnificent.
I felt like I saw their whole life in one anecdote, the sweep of it, and the loss where the window never again closed fully against the cold. But maybe that was just the way love is selfish at its core; I felt like that detail was the whole story because it’s a detail in my story, too. When one of you gets up to get a cup of coffee in bed, or draw the curtains without being asked to, or adjust the tilt of a screen during a movie, or share a pillow, or sometimes fall off to sleep while claiming you’re awake, I realise it’s sickening for anything to be this tender, to be this purely good, this soft and this kind.
It’s not just that kind of love, though, or it’s not the only version of love that looks like two people in a room. So many people do this— lying down in a room together, having chats about things of no consequence, things that matter the most. Nothing could be less special, or less original. This time refuses to distinguish itself. It feels like everything else, which is to say like nothing. But it still persists, on several mornings, this bed, this person, this half hour where absolutely nothing happens. No one outside of this can have any part of it; the room has no door.