I shared a bedroom and bunk beds with my brother when I was little (my full brother, not my half-brother, not my step-brother--I do indeed have one of each, an all-American family of misfits, of stops and starts of old and new family units, a transformer family, a frankenstein family, made of bits and pieces). I was on the bottom, a protective cave ceiling of metal wire and a spring-suspension ceiling, the mattress exposed between the rectangular grids, the western-style wood framing solidly pushed into a corner of the room. It was a shared pact, he on top, me on the bottom. I liked knowing he was up there looking over the entire room like a guardian, knowing where he was in case he wanted to be, well, a sibling, a brother, a pest. Some days the dividing line between best-friend-brother and torment-brother was quite thin.
For a time we lived in a basement, walls of painted cinder block, floors of painted concrete (the multi-colored stripes of wall-to-wall carpet in the living room being the exception, although even that didn’t provide much shock absorption when catapulting off the end of the couch), short rectangular windows up high near the ceiling. Our shared bedroom had a big walk-in closet, some might call it a “Harry Room”, being long and situated partly under the stairs. No door to the closet, just a floor to ceiling opening along another cinder block wall into what was almost big enough to be another room, especially for two children. Although clothes were hung above and games were stored on shelves in the closet, the floor was ours. Between shoes and boots, we laid out blankets and pillows, creating our own fort under the stairs. Dark, cozy, and secret, it was my favorite place to be.
scintilla: a hint, a trace, a spark, a flash
day four: talk about your childhood bedroom
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