My room is really more than just my room. It is not simply a box constructed by four walls. It is more than that. The ceiling is lower than it should be. Parts of it slant down creating the perfect alcoves and nooks. The honey-wood floor is slippery and gleams, despite the scratches here and there. The walls are a warm shade of mauve, labeled grapilicious by the manufactures. However, it is not the room’s first coat of paint. It was once a sickening bubblegum pink, only to be replaced by a striking midnight blue, and now the current purple. The walls are sleek and suave. They seem to possess a knowledge that only comes with more than a decade of wear, use and alteration. Yes, change; my walls have changed colors as often as the people in my life. Yet, despite the seemingly constant change of paint, pictures, posters, and knick-knacks on the walls, the walls themselves remain a constant. The pictures, too, are stable, or at least the thought behind them is because while the pictures may change the people remain the same.

It’s not just my room; it’s theirs too. Whose, you may ask? I’ll tell you. My room belongs to the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl whose picture is currently positioned between my mirror and its frame; and the artistic girl who stands next to me in a picture reel labeled best friends; and the girl who is seated in a library chair, poring over notes; and the brown-eyed, curly-haired guy who leans casually against a tree. All the same pictures with people in various positions plastered around my mirror. My room belongs to them, too. I look into my mirror and I see them. They are part of me, just as the walls are part of me. Whether I want them to be or not, and I want them to be, pieces of them are embedded in my soul. They help make me who I am.

The most important picture, however, is not around the mirror. At first glance, there is nothing unusual about it, nothing that shouts, “look at me, I’m the special one!” The picture is postcard-sized and the edges are fraying. It hangs on the most cluttered wall near the magazine cutouts and post-it notes, but it is away from all of that. The pictures occupants are a small boy and girl, about age eight. They are seated at a round table, playing cards in hand. They are not looking at the camera but at each other, huge smiles on their faces. There is no sign of the sorrow that is ahead. No foreshadowing to warn them that within months the boy will be dying in a hospital bed, hundreds of miles away.
The boy’s name was Jefferey. No one ever called him Jeff because, well, he wasn’t. He was a Jeffrey, through and through. The girl is me, or rather she was. She is the girl I used to be. She is more carefree, more trusting than I can ever hope to be. But, maybe, we are one and the same. There are signs of her in this room; in the brightly colored drawings that hang around the room; in the children’s books on the shelf. They were her favorite, they are mine, too. She is here, just as my friends are here. She will not be forgotten and neither will Jeffrey. As long as these walls still stand, as long as the pictures are there to tell the story, as long as I live to bear witness, their memories will remain.