A room, said Georges Perec, contains a personal history that is every bit as important, and perhaps less mundane, as that of a nation. Walking into a person’s room, I am sure someone must have said, is necessary to windowing into a soul as looking into the eyes. Because in order to function a room, as Virginia Woolf said, must be entirely of one’s own, must be large enough to hold all the spare parts that constitute a life.

To enter my room, one must take two steps up. The stairs are covered with fraying carpet, but the rest of the floor is hardwood (dull brown, significantly scraped). Someone painted the door’s trim coral, as well as the edges around my shallow closet and my two windows, one looking out onto a major street. Often, I forget to close my curtains (my two succulents need the light) until I hear a bus passing, or twin headlines illuminate my body, and I realize I may or may not be on display.

In the last two years, I have had four different bedrooms: one I shared with a boyfriend over a summer, then another where I lived alone. The third bedroom was in an apartment at the top of three or four rickety flights of stairs, in a building that probably should have been condemned. Each bedroom that I’ve lived in as an adult has, more or less, contained the same things: a bed, a nightstand, a dresser, a desk, and file cabinet. The only element that really alters is the space they occupy, like different covers for different editions of the same book.

My bedroom’s ceiling is ugly, drop-down. The borders still have some lingering grey on them from a previous tenant’s poor paint job. I’m told that the original ceiling above it is crumbling, but I’ve never seen it. There’s a single overhead fixture in the middle of the room that shines too brightly, but for some reason I keep turn it on automatically; perhaps because the switch is the first thing at hand when I walk through the door.

When I moved in, three of the walls were snot grey, and the fourth had been spray-painted gold. Two friends and I painted three of them white, and then covered the gold with an azure shade that’s a bit lighter than French blue.

Most of my furniture has been handed down or purchased lazily from big box stores. As such, I have little attachment to it. There’s my white colored nightstand I bought because it was cheapest. In college, I picked my bed frame out of a catalogue based on the criteria that I wanted a “princess bed.” There’s a dark dresser that a family friend gave me for free when she moved to France, and a bookcase that I bought only because it matched. I am a person prone to bursts of obsessive organization, and during one of those fits I alphabetized my books. The shelves also hold various knickknacks: a decorative box my uncle bought me in Vienna, a small brass telescope, a carved burro from the Grand Canyon, a ceramic tooth a friend sculpted in high school. I feel a strong attachment to these items, as well as a gift from my sister that sits on my dresser. It’s a kind of upright chest with six small drawers. She stripped the wood and repainted it a crisp, clean grey, and attached knobs to each drawer, alternating color wheels of pink and blue. When she gave me the chest I immediately felt guilty, because I hadn’t made anything for her. I still feel a bit guilty when I look at it.

I am really only attached to two pieces of furniture. The first is my desk, which is actually composed of a sheet of butcher block my father gave me, placed on top of two wooden sawhorses. The surface matches part of my parents’ kitchen counter, and always makes me think of home. The desk is lined with my favorite books. I also keep two cigar boxes on it, full of cards and photographs, and a cake box with writing materials inside. The butcher block is stained with rings from glasses I set down upon it, nail polish, and glue. This could be easily sanded away, but I keep the scars because seeing them feels like coming upon my own footprints in the snow. They tell me where I have been.

The second item is a small bookshelf, which I painted red, a regret. It was my mother’s when she was a child. When my sister and I were born, she painted it pink and green, and stenciled rabbits around it. By the time I painted over it, the design had chipped — the rabbits were hardly recognizable — but I despair at the idea of erasure.

To leave my room, one has to duck her head before going out the door. Otherwise one will knock one’s head on the lintel.

Each room of my life has been distinguished by the time in which I occupied it. I lived in my first bedroom for eighteen years, and shared it with my sister Johanna for all but two. The room was at the far end of the addition my father had tacked on to the studio he constructed in the late ‘80s, when my parents purchased ten acres of undeveloped land. They thought they would only have one child, but I arrived within a year of their move in.

My childhood bedroom is not as important as what happened outside it. I could tell you how my mother lost liters of blood when I arrived a week after my due date, and about the bag worms that took down the front yard’s pine tree; and our vicious pet roosters that clucked around our front door. There was nothing about the bedroom that was exquisite. It had brown, wall-to-wall carpeting, and every wall was painted white. Our two closets were side by side. My sister’s imaginary friend, a little man named Bip, lived in hers. First we slept in the same four poster beds our mother and Jane, our aunt, slept in when they were our age. When we grew, these were swapped out for a bunk with wood a color called “pickled white.” One night, our childless uncle babysat us and recited “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” to put us to sleep. It worked.

When I turned teenaged and sulky, I lay on the brown carpet and listened to mix tapes that the only boy who was ever interested in me in high school made for me. I learned that even though I could open the window and easily step out in to the night, sneaking to anywhere would be futile. We lived thirty minutes from the nearest town, and I hardly had any friends to speak of. Sneaking out into the night was only sneaking out into solitude, leaving my sister softly breathing in the top bunk to find night insects clicking away in an endless expanse of trees.

When I left my first room, it wasn’t because I was moving away. For years, my father had been building a second house at the back of the property: a colossus from the resurrected timber frames of a centuries-old barn. Our little house was intended to be temporary, but accidents, injuries, and my father’s diligent perfectionism delayed the move-in until the summer before I left for college. That room, where I still stay when I return home, was the first and only room that has ever been completely mine. I lined books on the timber frame ledges, and painted two walls misty green. In the morning, sunlight entered and warmed the space before I woke. The room is one of endless comings and goings: suitcases unpacked and packed again, a closet full of boxes I promise one day I will go through, clothes I’ve meant to give away, but hesitate, thinking just in case. I arrive in the room knowing I will swiftly depart from it again. At the end of that first summer, I left it for a sterilized slice in a high-rise dormitory, my first room away from Virginia, and a space I have nothing to say about because it wasn’t part of me.

My first bedroom away from home was at the top of a house on Atwood Street, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It had high ceilings and a fireplace filled in with brick. That’s when I bought my princess bed, and my father gave me the butcher block for my desk. The room was painted white, a white so clean it was like the inside of an egg. Telephone wires crisscrossed the view outside my window, abandoned sneakers dangling like they had fallen off the feet of specters ascending to heaven. It was the year of overwrought emotions and first boyfriends, hangovers, waking and smelling cigarettes on my clothes. The room in which I said, “I think I love you,” twice, and was twice wrong. The room I lived in when I cut off my hair and thought myself wild, my first tattoo leaked ink and blood onto my sheets. When I try to remember what my life looked like I think of a mirror that was on the wall when I moved in, a mirror that shattered me into fragments when I looked in it. I lived in that room for three years, and much of what I remember is as broken as my face in the glass.

I left the bedroom behind for a living room on 111th Street, Harlem. The living room had a pullout sofa with a lumpy mattress. My dresser was a suitcase I kept under my bed and a shelf above a radiator that screamed and boiled all night long. My roommate was in her thirties, and her presence filled the narrow apartment. She talked a lot about magic, and was writing a book about her childhood, her upbringing in a California cult. I watched her movies on her television at the foot of her pull out sofa, and tried hard not to be lonely. I read the entirety of The Golden Notebook on subway rides to and from the office where I worked in downtown Soho, and sat on the fire escape that reached outside the window, and trying hard not to feel hemmed in by the city stretching out in all directions towards what felt like the end of the earth. I only lasted in New York three months.

When I moved back to Pittsburgh, it was to close the distance between myself and a long-distance boyfriend. I moved into his room until I found my own. The suitcase stayed. I worked nights in a customer service department, arriving home when he was already asleep, and waking when he had already left for work. The room had a spare green carpet, and sweltered under a hot water pipe. It contained bookshelves, a tiny desk, and a bed. I tried hard to make my few things fit into the closet and a small area on the floor. The weekend before we all moved out, we pulled the mattress into the living room and slept on the floor. I moved into my own apartment, number A8½ , the first time I would live completely alone. It smelled like smoke from my neighbor’s cigarettes. The man above me would move furniture every night, after 11, and I would fall asleep listening to his laboring. It was an apartment falling apart at its hinges. The bathroom ceiling caved in. Fleas thrived in the carpeting. Only two of the burners on the stove got hot. I was not enough to fill the space alone.

In an emergency, there would be no way out of my last bedroom, the one before the place I live now. There was no fire escape. The landlord provided an emergency ladder, which we could supposedly hang out the window, and use to descend to safety. I kept the ladder in its box behind my door, and tried not to think about how the window didn’t open wide enough to climb through. I don’t miss that bedroom. When I moved, I shoddily patched a hole that I left behind when a poorly installed shelf collapsed beneath the weight of my cat sitting on it. When I took all the furniture out of my room, I was shocked by the amount of hair on the floor, and all the coins and bobby pins that had spilled from my pockets. The remnants of a year.

I don’t miss the room, but I miss the view. My roommate turned our porch into a small herb garden, pots bristling with lavender and rosemary, and we could put our feet up on the railing. All we could see was spectacular. The whole northern edge of the city spread out before us. On summer nights, the sky flushed pink, and during the day, if one looked closely, it was even possible to glimpse a part of the river slipping away, water carrying itself to whatever existed downstream.