Underground Week I

Underground

My space of choice may be verging on what is a ‘valid’ space for this assignment, but it does fall strictly into the category of what is an appropriate space. My space is my de facto bedroom in my childhood home which I visit fairly frequently and often stay for weekends. My parents still live in the house, in upstate New York, as does my older pseudo-brother, actually a first cousin who emigrated to the US from Europe. I have a younger brother who often spends time there on weekends as well, and he like I sometimes brings his significant other (and his dog) along. Other elements of my family are in town on a (very) permanent basis (like my grandparents), and still others visit with varying degrees of frequency.
A short explanation of why I ended up more or less ‘claiming’ the room may be helpful. When I grew up in the house, my room was elsewhere, on a different level of the house. I left for boarding school at fourteen and never spent all that much time there in the ensuing years. The room to which I had so identified with lost most of its significance for me over time, and by the time my cousin requisitioned it at my parent’s behest, I felt no real affection for it at all. On my visits home I would often sleep in my brother’s room, which neighbored it, or else on one of the many couches elsewhere in the house. This arrangement worked out just fine for me, and lasted about a year and a half. There was an occasion when another family visited my parents from abroad for several weeks, and those that had remaining bedrooms not in full-time use were obliged to vacate them for the period. Having no room myself anymore, and given the few people that suddenly needed to make use of any other suitable arrangements, I was basically relegated to the basement.
The basement is expansive, running the length and breadth of the sizable house. Half of it is finished and divided into several large and some smaller rooms, the other half is a utility space for laundry, tools, a workshop, storage, etc.
My parents, in an effort to make me feel welcome despite the shortage of rooms, did what they could to spruce up a smaller room in the finished half of the basement (now a defunct office space) and furnish it with a bed, dresser, armoire and other amenities.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I’ve maintained the odd space as my go-to room when I visit my parents (despite their pleas to get me to return to a bed upstairs when one is occasionally available), and my mothers fox-news like warnings about “mold,” “stagnant air,” “radon,” “CO2 poisoning” and other concerns that would be valid but for the fact that the room has a window which is often open and my fathers alarmist home-testing for all of said fears.

The space itself is small and what I would call cozy, it’s odd-shaped accounting for the intruding furnaces and machinery that were walled-off in the other half of the basement. This lends a certain unconventional feeling to the space, with a few odd-angled corners and diagonally-oriented walls. It’s dark, lit during the day only by a small gutter-window and single ceiling light bulb. There are numerous little ‘nooks’ with cushions, seats or poufs to sit, further enhancing the ‘cozy’ atmosphere of the room. The room has two large wall mirrors which are skewed at angles that don’t really afford an opportunity to view oneself in them from anywhere in the small room likely to be inhabited. I think this is partly because I don’t want any self-judgment or anxiety related to body-image issues to be prevalent in the room. The fact that the room is in the basement also lends to it a sort of infantile eeriness – it is, after all, where my brothers and I grew up, and the dark, expansive basement was an unending source of childhood fear related to dares, tricks or just rampant boredom. This made sleeping there challenging at first despite myself, but I’ve since become accustomed to it and these days only face a vague, intermittent sensation of trepidation when I drift off to sleep.