A Figmented Safe Haven

Did you have a place you could go when you were younger, just for you and no one else? A place that made you feel safe from the entire world, a hiding hole, or hovel - if you will?

I had one of those places, yet it was a place no one else could enter. However, I could see it clearly and visit any time I needed.

I explained in A Dark Adventure that I grew up having incredibly vivid dreams, night terrors/waking nightmares. My ability to decipher dreams from reality was nearly nonexistent at a very young age. Sometimes I could figure it out on my own, yet other times - it would take years for me to realize that an event never actually happened when I was awake. And it blew my mind that certain places never existed in the "real" world.

The brown room, I believe, was one of those places.

I grew up outside of a small town on a five-acre homestead. There were plenty of places to find refuge outdoors, but I needed one in my house that wasn't full of dirt and dead mice - like the cellar under the stairs. Mostly, I needed it to hide from my older brother. He wasn't very nice to me growing up and I retaliated any chance I could get, however, I was very small so hiding was always the better option.

My "brown room" appeared one day and I never questioned how. I used to hide at the top of the stairs in my mom's walk-in closet. I remember the walls inside it being brown shakes, yet, there is a very big possibility that's wrong. That's just how I remember it.

One day, in the back of mom's top-of-the-stairs closet, I found a small door. It was more so a square piece of wall that just snapped out of place, big enough for me to fit through.

The first time I crawled through, I remember feeling like I'd been in there thousands of times before. The entire room was brown. Walls, ceiling, carpet, chair, bookshelf, books, blanket, everything. All of it was brown and the room was the size of a large bathroom - perhaps 8' by 8' if I had to guess. There was a small box tv in the corner, in front of the brown chair, with a foil-wrapped antenna sticking out the top of it...exactly like the one in my actual bedroom. I felt like I'd been in that room my entire life, yet I had never seen it before.

Whenever I needed a place to hide - be it a storm, a fight, my brother, and sometimes my mom if I was in trouble - I'd hide in that room. I'd curl up in that brown chair with my brown blanket and watch that brown tv until I felt safe enough to return to my own room.

This went on for years.

Around 10 years old, I stopped using the brown room. I don't know entirely why, I'm guessing I just didn't need it anymore. That's probably around the time I got my very first best friend. That room would always be there waiting for me, though. I knew that deep down.

The day we moved out of that house, I think I was about 12, I wanted to say goodbye to that brown room that kept me so safe all those times. I went up the stairs one last time, opened mom's top-of-the-stairs closet doors, and knelt down to pop the square section of wall free.

There was no section. No seam, no lines around the square, no nothing. The wall was smooth as though the square never existed. My brown room was gone.

I remember sitting on my knees just staring at the closet wall trying to figure out what the actual hell had happened. Did mom board it up? Did she fix the wall? Was it ever real? Or was it only there because I needed it and now that I was moving it closed itself up?

Hours. Not minutes, hours. Hours and days across multiple years did I spend in that room. I brought things into it and left them there. I drew pictures and hung them on the brown walls. I wore holes in my brown blanket and put new foil on my tv antenna. All that time. Where the hell was I?

I also remember one weekend, when I was little, I went to my dad's house and he asked how things were going at home. I told him that I had a new room that I spent most of my time in and everything was brown. He didn't think much of it because my actual room used to be brown. It had been painted pink before my secret brown room appeared. Dad thought that I was just making up stories again.

That room was real. It had to be. If it wasn't, it was so real to me that I can't comprehend the fact that it never existed. I just can't. If that room was one of my vivid dreams and not a memory - it was incredibly convincing.

I hope that anyone, anywhere, who needs a brown room of their own to make them feel safe has the blessing of it appearing in the back of their closet whenever they need it.

That brown room was my safe haven. And it was real to me.