I am 18 and moving into my new dorm alone.
There is cardboard and stray bits of styrofoam sticking to my palms, my lungs are grainy with dust that just won’t seem to air out from my tiny dorm window. I realize dimly that I never bought a lightbulb for my shiny new IKEA light. As I continue sifting through the mountain of Amazon boxes in the dark, straining to unpack my shower caddy with the feeble glow of my desk lamp—I really should have remembered to buy a lightbulb—I try to ignore the slightly panicked feeling rising from my chest: This room could not be a home.
Forlornly, I try to pinpoint the source of what in my room is making me so ill at ease: I stare the exposed navy of my mattress—because, of course, my bedding hadn’t shipped on time—and the bare, white walls. The walls.
In all the spaces I had ever claimed as my own, my walls had never been bare. In my first home—a squat square of an apartment flat in the bustling center of Seoul, where I was born—my bedroom bore a colorful testament to my childhood. The small strip of wallpaper just outside the door was marked with records of my height like so many colorful joints along its spine. One wall was entirely dedicated to swoopy crayon renditions from the one time I wanted to draw on the walls and my parents never cared to cover them back up.
My sense of home here had been immediate and organic; like the lines of my crayon drawings bleeding directly into the wallpaper, I fit seamlessly and organically into the humid streets of Seoul. I could trace the line of old gingko trees outside our apartment by memory. Come fall, I knew to avoid stepping on their pungent and slippery fruit on the sidewalk, where the neglected red brick would chip and break away from weeds.
I moved to Johannesburg when I was nine, to a bigger room where the bare walls were the color of slate and no gingko trees shadowed the street outside my window. The air was drier, the sun hotter, the sky wider. If the walls of my room in Seoul were patterned by the roots of my childhood, my room in Johannesburg was a reflection of my teenage years in all its earnest, ungainly, and delightful ways.
First to line the walls were K–Pop posters, glossy and vibrant next to postcards picked up from art museums; then hung lanyards from school events, photos of my friends, and plane ticket stubs. From music posters to photos, to my brief but unfortunate phase in 2020 when I had free access to a photo printer and Pinterest, my bedroom walls donned new decorations just as quickly as they shed them—reflecting my changing interests as I grew up in South Africa. It was, at times, messy and over–the–top; my Korean father would warily eye the gleaming posters of BTS winking above my mirror and timidly suggest that I could consider leaving more empty space on the wall. But, it became just as familiar as the colored–in wallpaper of my home in Seoul—an extension of who I am represented in a shifting collage over my bed.
At every major period of change in my life—childhood, adolescence, and college—I found myself in a new space as much as a new period of my life: Seoul, Johannesburg, and Penn. Through each turn, decorating my room became an important step to claiming a space and community as my own; each poster, photo, or trinket I add to my wall is an important ritual of self–reflection and an active effort to find home wherever I go.
I am 18 and studying in my dorm alone.
In front of my desk where I type is a photo of me and my friends during senior year, graduation gowns slung over jeans and blouses as we get ready for yearbook pictures. Tucked in between two neon Post–it notes with scrawled–on midterm deadlines, there are ticket stubs and receipts from trips to New York and around Philly: the one on the right is from an impulsive visit to the Met, my first time, where we spent too much time taking pictures on the front steps Gossip Girl–style. Above my bed hangs a poster by an illustrator I met this summer and gaudy photobooth pictures, our features comically airbrushed. It is small, but a meaningful collage of both the life I built since I’ve moved in and the places of my past. It’s nothing like the spread I had built in my room back in Johannesburg and much of the walls are still bare, but that’s alright. This room is on its way to becoming a home.
