"Wait, Carmen, your door is locked."
"I know it is."
"...Say goodbye to it. This is the last time you'll ever see it."
"There's no right way to say goodbye."
The door shut and that was it, four boxes, two suitcases, five reusable shopping bags, nine songs from a decade ago, and three batches of tearful goodbyes later. I'd hugged everyone time and time again ever since I missed Amanda, and I kept waiting for each gentle touch to make everything settle and all the memories permanent.
I clenched the keys in my hand. I had already waved off my roommate, her friends, my own friends, even my mom, I'd gone to a meeting, I'd fallen asleep in a pile of clothes, and I'd curled up on a bare mattress in a room I once called home. Everytime I looked around, I didn't know where it had gone. The posters were gone and all I could think of was how alive it used to feel when it was just us, just us and some bottles sitting in the middle of forever.
I glanced at the hallway. Josh walked forward, opened the door to 614, and looked at me. "Someone needs to talk to you guys."
I walked up for more hugs and as Josh begged for the cure to swine flu, I was busy recollecting the instant past:
"So many things have happened in this room."
A sentiment echoed, indeed, by my other friends and also by my memories and my pictures. I tried to flip through the countless moments spent there and could hardly get past the pre-clubbing parties, the nights of Kings and the exuberance of a night spent celebrating every holiday worth the time. We had been there for so many different reasons, and we had experienced so much by each poster. This was the room where we'd become friends with people, where we'd planned schedules and discussed moving and rooming, where we'd crammed for finals and tests and tasted everything on the Earth. I feel as though I lived an entire year without truly realizing that that lonely and desolate space had become the warmest and most loving in my life.
It was naked again when Josh and I left; we both took the time to absorb the cracked cinderblocks and misplaced ceiling tiles that we had never noticed as every sign, poster, and movie advertisement was summarily removed. I carried my life out of Hughes 619 box by box, adjusting for time and rushing a life well spent into a gray hatchback in the rain. By the time Josh showed up, the first time, he and Saba were in place to watch as I finished what she had started, and the second time, we were abandoned by a mother who rushed off and ordered us to "meet her downstairs."
This takes me, again, to the end of a hallway. I was a corner room infamous in the entire building for being an epicenter of laughter but had never been formally charged with a noise violation; I was the young woman who had stood at the edge of that hallway with a cheerleading cone in her hands yelling, "you guys need to get the lights on in this hallway right now!" as the boxes clouded my view of a once-pristine living quarters; I was the typical, archetypal, all-too-cartoon resident who disobeyed every noise rule and some of the others with a grin on my face and loved to pull out the most resilient defense of them all- "I'm a feminist."
And when my mom stood in that same spot, staring down a room that had, literally, held me as I went through all of life's most glorious and most tragic, asking me what the fuck I was doing, I told her the truth.
"I'm taking everything down but that fortune. I'm leaving that fortune taped to my door."
It was a white slip of paper covered in Scotch Tape and it was now emblazoned across the door, right above the all-too-useful-for-quick-who's-knocking-shit-it's-finals-week-they-hate-us peephole. Josh asked me what it said, and as I looked around to realize it was the only paper still vandalizing the corner room, I tried to decide how best to read it. I settled on a voice.
"Smile Often,
And See What Happens."
Goodbye, 619.
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