You may have seen my submission, but I wanted to write a little more about it here.
When moving into uni halls, I moved out of a bedroom that I had put time and effort and love and all of my personality into, and was allocated a generic blank box, complete with mass ordered, characterless furniture (have I ever mentioned I despise cheap-looking pine fittings?).
My uni room wasn't home when I moved in, and my old room very much was. Sanctimonious, beautiful and a culmination of many inspirations.
I spent weeks mood-boarding, after years spent pulling and storing beautiful pages out of interior magazines Vogue and Stella. The floor was chosen, a beautiful ebony false wood, and I spent two days painting over the previous owner's colour choice. I wanted an industrial, post apocalyptic renaissance feel, because I'm obsessed with fantastical escape, yet live in dystopia. The grey walls, with gold splatters, weren't exactly how I wanted them in reality, but in my mind they were peeling golden plaster; the Russian palaces after the revolution, broken and decaying but steeped in lavish indulgence.
Hidden beauty and interest had to be incorporated. What is the point of something that isn't beautiful? So I used Russian dolls as jewellery storage, vintage bags to store odds and ends, and swathed everything else in beautiful fabric, hiding the functional reality under a veil of sparkles and flowers.
 |
| a shelf. |
 |
| The golden accents |
 |
| A belly dancing belt to cover the book spines |
Now my uni room feels lived in. It is still very neat because I deal a lot better with order and a blank space, sort of like a dramatic black box to create in, but now I feel more at home here. The institutionalised feel continues to linger, and there is a funny smell that I need to buy incense to overcome, but slowly but surely I have added little touches of myself into my new room.
It leaves me in a very interesting state of transience. When visiting home it doesn't feel like home any more - it is the same, yet different. On my return, I'm not arriving at a safe place, I'm coming into an rented room with a fixed leaving date. Not going to get too comfortable!
Perhaps it is a good thing. After all, with no place to be tied down to one is filled with a sort of wanderlust, a yearning to achieve and create a something new, something influential yet still mine. However, I can't help thinking that if I was living in more of a wretched hole, like some of the halls I've seen, it would be harder to let go of the past and move into the future. If I was in one giant, breakable party house, would I ever want to move into the future? Or would I happily squander for eternity. Fearfully, I think the answer to that question might be yes!
