Purple Walls

Prompt: At the assembly on the first day of school, Dr. Majerus instructed us all to imagine a place that makes us feel peaceful. Describe- as concretely and vividly as you can- the place you imagined that morning. 

 In December of 2020 my family moved houses. We didn’t move far, we didn’t even leave Savoy, but all the same my space changed drastically. 

My room is at the very end of the upstairs hallway. It’s the smallest bedroom and has purple walls. It’s a very light shade of as pure of a purple as you can get. It doesn’t lean pink and it doesn’t lean blue. It’s perfectly in the middle. 

I know a very young girl chose this color. The images we saw online when deciding whether to buy the house or not showed dolls arranged neatly on a pink desk in the corner. That was all gone now, and the walls looked somehow uninviting and cold to me at first. In the empty room the purple reflected a weird grey in natural light. I was put off by it at once. I remember asking my parents over and over again to paint them. I wanted them to be sage green, my favorite color. My parents told me to hold off until the spring when it would be much easier to paint them. I agreed. 

That winter came and went. The spring came and went. I learned to live with the purple. For my birthday I received an arrangement of fairy lights from my aunt which spanned the whole of my wall. The little lights now sit very nicely against the purple. The combination of colors drew out the warmth in the walls. In the evenings my room looked like a sort of fairy den. Eventually I had not only learned to live with the purple, I quite enjoyed it. Now, I couldn’t imagine my room a different color. I’ve grown too used to it. The green will have to wait for a college apartment I’m afraid. 

Though I spend extraordinarily little time there nowadays between school, sports and other commitments, I can’t think of a place that makes me more peaceful than my bedroom. Every detail in the layout is done in a way which I’m pleased with. For example, when we moved in I made sure to arrange the bookshelves in such a way that it feels sort of encased in books. All the furniture is also white which gives the whole room a cohesive feel. I’m very happy with how it came out. 

It’s the familiarity and personalization that I think makes my room peaceful to me. I’m more comfortable in places I know well, as I’m sure is the case with many people, and there’s no place I know better than my own bedroom.