The sky is a vastness of blue. The wind is silent. The sun shines bright. Its rays warm up the grass I am sitting on. Comfortable. Soft. Spacious. Floating on this pasture, a calm sea of green, it reminds me of home. My bed. My bedroom. “Oh, how much I miss being home,” I sigh. I cannot believe that I am more than nine hours away from my beloved family, almost 500 miles from my fortress.

My bedroom is a strong fortress that consists of four walls as white as the Capitol building, which protect me from my two disruptive and deafening sisters. At times they can be as annoying as a leaky faucet, especially when they are bathing in the pond. Their loud singing is disturbing and dissonant. Their voices are flaming arrows that travel through the air and are destined to weaken and damage the walls of the fortress. The entrance gate is a rectangular beige door with a golden shiny door knob that provides the only access to the fortress. On the back side of the door, you can find a yellow calendar that contains the undertakings that I have to execute each day. Looking to your right, you will be able to find a desk buried under mountains of papers, folders, and books, and most strikingly, a portable and compact machine that allows me to travel through time. Above the desk, you will observe an overflowing bookshelf that looks like a bursting volcano of papers, which includes classic novels such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Dickens’s Great Expectations, to the renowned epic poem, La Divina Commedia, by my namesake, Dante Alighieri. Above the bookshelf, centimeters from touching the roof, dusty trophies, medals, and ribbons have been placed over the years, forming several rows of statues as formidable as the terracotta army of the first emperor of China.

As you move on past the desk, and walk through the small corridor of the fortress, you will see a small screen, a little bigger than the size of a pizza box, which is my television. Next to
it, you will have the opportunity to view a masterpiece that is attached to the fortress’s wall. This artwork was not painted by Leonardo da Vinci, nor by Michelangelo, but by me, the proprietor of the fortress. This recent painting is a portrait of the owner’s best steed, “Rocky”, a dachshund wiener canine, who collapsed in the battlefield after sacrificing his own life for his owner; sitting straight and surrounded by a forest green background. To the right of the painting, you can see the great wall of portraits, which includes several photographs of me, the owner, in my past profession, playing a good old game of soccer.

The next stop is the closet. Two sliding white doors guard a rainbow of clothes, from shirts and jeans, to soccer jerseys, ties, and suits. If you follow me back to the entrance, I suggest you pay close attention so you do not miss the best part of my room, an oblong wooden and extremely comfortable bed, covered with blankets as blue as the expansive sky, and topped with a soft pillow. Next to my bed, a square-like wooden green nightstand stands straight, balancing a small lamp and an impatient digital clock that has laser blue eyes and roars incessantly every morning, like a frustrated dragon, to wake me up. A tetragonal window, covered by wooden shutters, provides me with oxygen molecules, light, and the beautiful sounds of nature, from birds twittering in the morning, to crickets chirping at night, that relax me. Finally, a circular lamp that looks like a moon, hangs from the ceiling of my room, illuminating the interior of this fortress.

This concludes the tour. I hope you have enjoyed and learned more about me after visiting my room, Dante’s White Fortress. As you exit this building do not forget to tip the tour guide, this will allow me to keep these tours running for many years.

All that I told you is a lie.

The White Fortress only exists in my memory. It was taken over by one of my villainous sisters as soon as I left for the Medieval University. The fortress was unguarded and desolate, so she seized the opportunity to capture it and make it her own. All of the white walls that were once decorated with photographs and paintings have been demolished. Posters of “famous” musicians and artists, such as Brandon Flowers, The Killers and One Direction have been placed all over the fortress. The wooden shutters that once covered my window have been dismantled and substituted by floral, pink curtains. My lovely bed, which I long for, has been ripped apart and buried in the basement. My expansive compilation of books has been reduced to ashes, and in its place, music records from the 60s and pop music CD’s, have rolled into the interior of what once was my stronghold.

This is unfortunate. Everything has physically banished, just like a message that is sealed in a glass bottle and thrown into the roaring sea, lost and with no sense of direction. Yet, this bedroom, my bedroom, has a special place in my heart, in my mind. I will never forget the White Fortress. It will always be with me.

I miss all of these things, even my dearly loved sisters, despite how much they may antagonize me. I miss the trophies, the photographs, the painting; my bedroom. All of these things inundate my mind with memories. I have not been home for months now, and it has felt like an eternity. I will be going back home soon, and I will like to see how different it feels to see that my room is no longer there. I hope I do not faint from shock after seeing that my dear fortress has been transformed into a realm of music, flowers, and fashion. Hopefully, everything else has remained the same; I do not know if I could handle more.

It will feel different not being able to escape into my fortress, to slam down the gates, and enter my majestic realm. A part of me will be missing. My bedroom, the White Fortress.