A little known phenomena… You can be old when you are young. I was young. Not yet 21. Third year University. Survived the crashing onset of depression come out of the blue. Arriving one day a great cloak of stillness. Leaching color from daylight. Literally one hour the sun shone, the next it poured its guts out and everything was irrevocably altered. Survived by a series of bad fixes and defaults. Not the same person. Possibly destroyed still standing. I took a room in the university town dorms because it felt like I might not die if I could keep pretending I was coping.

Standing on a chair in the small room I inspected the early blemish of cellulite on my thin thighs. I imagined swinging from tied bedsheets. It felt like a relief. The air was hot because the university paid the heat so everyone cranked it up. You could dry socks and bras on the radiators and they’d smell clean and comforting. We’d go out in the rain and get soaked as an excuse to press them against the hot metal and see steam escape from the close knit wool. Filling the room with steam.

My room had a pitch ceiling and a view of the canal. I had a double futon without its base on the floor with my childhood clown duvet. I collected things from outside charity shops that people left in plastic bags. Rationalizing it was only stealing if I wasn’t in need. But I lived off $10 a week which wasn’t near enough. So I needed the solace of a plastic Wendy house and a one eyed Hello Kitty very much. I made creations out of what I found. A chair from an old rocking horse. A mobile from doll parts. A desk from a broken piano stand. A kids record player that didn’t work but I could use as a nightlight.

The clothes I found were a jarring mix of 1950s green chiffon baby-doll gowns smelling of lily of the valley talcum powder and unwanted acid wash dirty jeans from 13 year old boys. Well fitting was a foreign concept. I was hollow from hardly eating and sleeping. Subsisting on almond biscuits and pouches of tobacco, my lungs defiantly strong from bicycling miles uphill. Muscles dotted my arms and my breasts had shrunk to fit the ratty girls leotards with gym badges that still smelt of competitiveness. I was a good scrounger. I had no shame to my poverty. Only an urge to smoke from my windowsill and watch the turgid water in the canal scurry downstream to a mix-tape made by someone who just wanted to get their leg over.

The girl in room 4D lived opposite. There was glass at the top of her door. Once I used my Jerry rigged chair with a sad painted horse head, to peak into her room. It was a gross invasion. She’d left clothes cartwheeled across the cheap carpet. A Chekov play. A cut Coca-Cola bottle filled with paper water blossoms. Balls of foil socks and chocolate wrappers. Purple Lurex panties on her grey radiator, twin of mine. She had black curly hair like my family does and brown eyes. She didn’t wear bras and she did wear Doc Martins and cheap paisley dresses over t-shirts. She dressed like Courtney Love right down to the violet eyeliner. Her name was Morag. I found her irresistible.

When we weren’t at university we hung out in the communal kitchen or bathrooms playing house. She liked to cook. I had always known how to iron like a professional. She’d bake strange cakes, drizzled in ripe fruit that upset your stomach. We’d cram them in and wash them down with strong tea. I’ve never drink tea with milk before or afterwards but I did with her. I’d iron her clothes until they looked new and she’d sit on them to muss them up. “Courtney wears her clothes creased,” she’d observe.

Fresh from high school, the most she’d done was steal a lip-gloss from Woolworths and let a boy with a black eye who she felt sorry for, french kiss her. She said his tongue tasted of fish and felt like a live eel. When she menstruated even her blood smelt clean. She’d got B’s throughout school and above average attendance. Her babysitter hadn’t anally raped her. Her mother didn’t make her kneel on broken glass, she didn’t come from a long line of emotional derelicts. She was as normal as flowers in springtime. She hadn’t even heard of BDSM or American Psycho. She didn’t like the feeling of hurting herself with something sharp.

I could have taught her to blow a perfect smoke ring. Used the old trick or massaging her aching feet as a prelude to something. Eaten hash browns with her at the local cinema watching Betty Blue. I could have told her what it was like when four boys under 12 asked me to enact scenes they’d seen in their fathers porno msg. And what they did when I said no. But I wanted to shield her, the girl in room 4D from being old when you’re not.

When we lay on her bed after class and I’d finished reading Prince Caspian, she held my hand shyly and asked me what it was like growing up in the city. Did you really climb out of your window and go clubbing? Her eyes were wide and her mouth was full like a velvet sofa. I couldn’t tell her why I burned so hot so young. What horrors I ran from. How much I knew long before anyone should. I didn’t want to dirty her future with my past. Yeah, what about that? Naughty teenager! I made light of what wasn’t light. How can a kid not yet 21 have a past long enough and airless enough to be dragged down by it? Yet many do. Even as they smile as they hand out your McOrder and walk home in the rain, to save bus-fare. How they may feel dirty, for not being whole, or the bluntness of life may be too sharp to bear waking up to.

I put her clothes to rinse with the tenderness of a good mother. I slept in my own room. Not yet 21. I felt old enough to have birthed her. I was a lesbian who still slept with boys to keep from losing hope. She married her first a year after graduation. I didn’t go to the wedding. I felt by then I’d been alive three lifetimes. Being near her made me notice my stink; day old fish. She was unblemished and kind like a child. I expect she looked up to me. Thought me ‘worldly’ though she didn’t understand the irony. Some scars are invisible. Sometimes you make chairs out of rocking horses because you’re trying to keep busy from dying. It was all-wrong to feel old when the rest of the world would have seen my baby-fat-face and declared me not-much-beyond-child. Inside I was turning 100. Her innocence a shocking reminder of how trauma ages you, even before you have the words.

(Sometimes I watch young women now, laughing. All I remember was wading through dark water. Clinical depression usually strikes around 18 although the signs are there long before and trauma acts as an ON switch. The first response is often secrecy. Like an eating disorder, teens and young-adults bury themselves in denial and sometimes drugs, to get away from the shame of not understanding why they woke up one day irrevocably changed. It’s not true medication always helps, or that therapy does. Clinical depression is like a raging hormone, it doesn’t let up just because you sip chamomile or jog 5 miles daily. There are things that help and things that hinder, but what we as a society are yet to fathom, is depression is like a cancer. Some people get it. Some people do not. It’s not because of something you did and it isn’t a personality flaw. I spent my life running from it, denying it, working-around-it. High-functioning or not, the shame others instill in you, including family, creates a life-long scar. The next time someone irritates you because they’re not happy, consider this before you tell them to ‘snap out of it’ or quietly condemn them for not being stronger. Would anyone choose to feel 100 at 20? )

4 Replies to “The girl in room 4D.”

  1. In the tags, you left out #kindness, but it is there; “But I wanted to shield her, the girl in room 4D from being old when you’re not.” And in the ironing of the clothes and such, and the sense of mothering. I think it is not unusual that in pain we must choose so, whether to inflict or protect. What is rare is being conscious of the choice at the time, it being driven I suppose by something we call “character”. And when we barely feel we know how to manage ourselves, even to survive, that kindness and care taking for another is healing, if only by giving a purpose to survival that we cannot see for our self.

    This is a touching tale, beautifully told. I find a line from a song come to mind, and I wonder, having been so much older then, are you younger than that now?

  2. gosh! This was so, so powerful! Trauma does age you. I can attest to that. having lived through much trauma in my life. Xx

  3. SMiLes Dear Candie
    Dropping By the Memory
    of Your 4-D Room It’s True
    Beyond Distance, Space
    And Time

    The Fourth
    Level is Really
    So Far Below Above

    As i Got to Go to the Place
    Where We aRe 100 At 20 too…

    True, Most Folks Never Get To Go
    to the 4-D Place Below As True Neither
    Time, Distance, or Space Time out of Time

    in Darkness
    Indeed it is

    BLacK Abyss
    of Soul So Deep
    So Low Never A Place
    Even Demons Will Dare to Tread

    Oh Why, Oh Why, Do We Have to Go
    WHere Nobody Arounds Us Goes Where
    Alone is More Together Than The Place So Far Below

    Shall i Put it into Words

    Does Hell Have Verse

    Does Hell Have Feelings

    Even Fear In All that is

    Numb of Piece of Paper Existence Below

    It’s True i Once Had A Psychotherapist Who
    Said Folks With Severe Disorders of Being Numb
    Striving to Feel Anything At All, All the Cuts So Deeply

    Engraved
    Of Hell

    Just
    to Poke
    One Part
    of Existence Out to Sense

    True They Determined They Were
    Garbage Not Worthy of Their Help at All…

    Oh Why, Oh Why, Do People Have to go To Hell
    Oh Yes, Oh Yes, Hell Does Exist ‘They’ Will Never

    Understand

    Unless they
    Get to Go Where
    No Place Exists At
    All Within too For Real…

    Anyway Being Buried Alive
    Was Enough For me No Way
    to Even Cut Myself All Covered With Dirt…

    i Went There at 20 And Thought it Was Hard…

    i Went There Again at 21 That Felt Like Over 101

    And Then i Went to Hell Forevernow at Age 47 For 66
    Months Where Ever Second Is An Eternity of Never Ending

    Time All
    Is Time
    All Is Time
    Just No Way
    to Reach The Next Second Now…

    And Now my Cheshire Cat Smile Lasts
    Forevermore True All there is is Forevermore

    When 4-D Moves to the Other Side of 5-D Now

    And True i’ve Heard Folks talking About 5-D too…

    Never Really Researched it As i Realize i’m Already Here…

    Just Energy Spiraling With No Form Just Inhaling Peace Exhaling LoVE For Real

    And it’s True Passing Through the 4-D Experience for 7.7 Years or so in Life Makes

    Forevernowmore

    That Much

    More

    Delicious
    To Savor Eternally Now
    A Delicious 103.6 Months Indeed..:)

Comments are closed.